I’m really interested in this whole discussion (from the last post).  It sounds like we all agree that meaningful relationship across the religious divide is possible, but only if:

a) we don’t talk about religion, or
b) we’re open to the other person being right (about their religious beliefs) or both of us being wrong or
c) we think we’re right, but we nevertheless don’t see other people as projects, in need of conversion.

Here’s the problem I see:  none of these seem like options for the deeply devout.  Am I wrong in this?  When I was an evangelical Christian, I took my faith very seriously.  My feelings, on one level, so confirmed for me the rightness of my spiritual path, and the teachings of my holy book seemed to so clearly say mine was the only True way, that the thought of another religion being more true than mine was nearly inconceivable.  Furthermore, my understanding of hell, and my conviction that many would end up there if they didn’t turn to Jesus:  these made it nearly impossible for me NOT to see anyone not so turned as a mission field.  I didn’t use in-your-face conversion tactics, but I was very aware of trying to be a good witness for the Truth, of watching for chances to speak of Jesus, of feeling a warm gladness if conversation turned to religious things.  My heart was good; I genuinely wanted non-Christians to know the Truth, and to spend eternity with God.  But the effect of this good-heartedness was to make people into projects.  My relationships were colored by this conversion agenda, and when things stayed "light" (i.e. I just had fun with non-Christians and didn’t think or talk about anything goddish) I felt by the end of the time a little disappointed, and a little bit guilty.

Is is possible to not be like this, and also be deeply devout?  I’d love to hear what it would look like if it is.

Taking steps away from religion, I think it’s entirely possible to have conversion agendas about things other than God.  We all have them–desires for friends to try the beer we like, or join the neighborhood watch, or be convinced of global warming, or that we need to do something about Darfur, Congo, AIDS, cancer research, etc.  The difference, though–and this is part of Harris’s point I think–is that all of these other agendas can be discussed in terms of observable evidence, while the finer points of religious belief cannot.  At the end of the day, a "leap of faith" must be made when it comes to trusting that God has revealed God’s ultimate plan for the world in the Bible, or Allah dictated the Quran, or a man named Noah existed, and all of us–black, brown, white, yellow, red–are his descendants.

So the agendas on the plates of the religiously devout have a different sort of charge to them I think, and a really challenging combination of having everything at stake (i.e. eternal location), and no luxury of observable evidence, beyond our subjective feelings of our religion being true, of God being one way versus another, etc., to use for the convincing.  How can we as humans NOT get a little dogmatic, even if just in our hearts, when we’re up against this sort of challenge, and needing to psyche ourselves up for the work we feel God’s given us to do?

I’m still back to wondering whether it’s possible for the religously devout to come to relationship with people of other faiths, or no faith, and have the kind of intimacy with them, or just merely the respect, that seems built on seeing each other as equals.  I’m thinking that it’s not.

I’m reading Sam Harris’s The End of Faith these days–a book I’d like to review here in coming weeks, once I’m through.  It’s very quotable.  He’s more caustic than I’d want to be were I to broach his subject, but I think he has some very important things to say.  He thinks there’s no way to avoid escalating violence in our world except for religion to die.  He thinks religion divides people irreconcilably, and makes rational discourse impossible, since faith, as he sees it defined by the majority in every religious tradition, is belief that things about God and our world are true without needing evidence to prove it.  Without evidence available to discuss the truth or untruth of a claim, and indeed, in a climate where criticizing or critiquing one another’s faith is taboo, how can we navigate life together?  How can we not stay divided if each of us believes deeply something fundamentally different about God (as one example) which isn’t open to rational, evidentiary discourse?

I’m not sure if you got all that, but what I’m wondering a lot these days is whether he’s right.  One of the greatest tragedies I know, and by know I mean experientially, is the way religious beliefs divide people who otherwise have so much in common.  There are so many things that all of us, across the board of religions and cultures, share in being human–fears that we have, hopes, longings, worries about jobs or kids or finances, losses, illnesses, joys, experiences of redemption.  We have a wealth of things in common.  And yet it seems to me that religion becomes a kind of gatekeeper for any of this to get realized.  If I’m not one of your flock, the gateway of meaningful relationship gets swung shut.  And vice versa.  The gate becomes what determines whether or not we can be comfortable together, whether or not we can explore the geographies inside of us to discover common ground.  Indeed, it can become a source of bitterness and condescension and rivalry and distrust.  It causes violence.

Do you think this is true?  Is intimacy and respect, of the kind for which I imagine all of us ultimately long, possible between people when one or both are religiously devoted, but not to the same religion?  Maybe the taboos against critiquing faith are really about trying to keep that gatekeeper sleepy, trying to find ways to slip past an otherwise wall to find ourselves together, at ease, in love.

I know many of you are not involved in a Christian subculture, but those of you who are might appreciate what Bobbie has to say in her latest post, Dirty Little Secrets:  Porn and the Church.  Regardless of how you personally define God and Satan, heaven or hell, I think her theory makes a lot of sense, and gets to some important layers of what’s true of us–maybe particularly of those involved in public forms of ministry or service.  Go check it out.

It’s Saturday, and I’m sitting on a bench on Stanford’s campus, surrounded by palm trees and ivy and massive stone buildings.  Memorial chapel is to my right and I hear the bell tower bong in the distance, water from a fountain cascading endlessly nearby.  Jet black squirrels bound across pavement; birds flit through morning routines.  What does this do to me, in me?

Since Robin sent me this link I’ve been thinking about land and space, about the ways these get inside of you, providing threads for the weave that is how you think about life and self and God, how you see yourself in relation to them.  The link is to a sermon that deals, in part, with the ways the natural world shaped its writer’s life.

I grew up in a desert in California, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley.  We had two seasons there:  hot, and gray.  The grayness was fog that was a lid on our valley through winter.  Often it descended to the ground, making visibility no farther than the tullip tree on our front lawn.  While other regions have snow days, we had fog days–school delayed or cancelled because of the challenge fog posed for safe travel.  Seriously.

But summer was nearly the opposite.  From May through most of October temperatures hovered in the upper 90s, often staying near or surpassing 100 for long stretches.  It was dry heat, and fierce.  Bare feet were only for grass.  There were no clouds in the sky, save the accumulation of dust and exhaust and pollen and the various sprays the farmers used to work their fields. 

Which is one of the ironies, I think, of my early desert home: it was shockingly furtile.  One of the hugest exporters of produce in the world.  Nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots, apples, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, grapes, cherries, tomatoes, melons, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, tangerines.  The list really does go on.  And it was furtile not because these things could grow on their own, could just spring up and stay there, happy.  This was a desert, after all.  It was because people worked night and day to make it so.  The irrigation system there alone inspires awe.  The human power it takes to plant and pick and prune that list is breathtaking, no matter how many machines are involved.  And the machines!  I went with some friends to a county fair one time and felt like I had been transplanted to another universe, walking through rows of metal giants engineered for every kind of farm need imaginable–a show for farmers, apparently, to elicit the lust unique to that trade.

So this rhythm, this hot and gray cycle with the relentless backdrop of turning desert into food:  this was the natural world that joined the shaping of me.

I think about all of this as I ponder my spirituality, and my early thoughts about God.  I think about how hot it felt to be under God’s gaze.  How wide open my life seemed to Him (my early God was male)–no mountains or hills or forests in which to hide.

I think about how hard I understood the Christian life to be.  How much work it took to learn about God and to nurture the fruits of God’s spirit. How His fruits didn’t come naturally, and required constant planfulness and attention, including practices that weren’t spontaneous to body or soul’s terrain.  But how diligence usually paid off.  How satisfying the rows of tended thoughts and prayers and plans and relationships could feel.  Mine was not an untamed heart.

And I think about the quietness I loved about the fog, the way I felt hugged by it.  How I liked to feel hidden inside of it, even as I worried about its effects on my bangs.  There is safety in fog, even with its danger.  Safety in feeling a cushion between oneself and the directness of an exacting God.  People get killed in the stuff–huge pile-ups along Highway 99–but there are trade offs, too.  Sometimes danger is worth a little quiet anonymity.

My heart has had seasons of growth since then, seasons of new lands and new threads added from those lands.  I lived in Oregon and now near San Francisco’s bay, and my heart is learning what it means to grow a little more wild.  To have flora and fauna natural to it flourish.  To think of God with the subtlety of gentle sunshine, like we have a lot of here; with the playfulness of our on and off breeze.  I don’t think early threads ever get unwoven, though, so I carry in me desert, too.  Always.  The promise of much fruit and the understanding that a lot of work may be involved in cultivating it.  I carry in me stark, open land that is a kind of inescapable honesty, and a yearning to be wrapped up in the danger-comfort of something soft and accepting and mysterious and quiet.

God isn’t my desert-God anymore, though, and I’m not sure how that happened, how the threads that were my early God became a garment that lays on the ground now, God clothed in other things, or sometimes all the way bare.  God seems a kind of mystery that resists the clothes I offer, that seems to be taking of my desert threads, and my wet, green Oregon threads, and the threads of my current space and weaving from them something I can’t yet recognize, and don’t feel in much of a hurry to be able to.

So I sit here wondering.  Or filled with wonder, maybe.  Breathing in these granite stones, this wide courtyard of interwoven brick, the expanse of air and sky above my head.  It’s getting inside of me.  It’s doing something.

I’m thinking about Plato today.  I know just enough to pretend I have a working knowledge of his thought, so that’s what I aim to do.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m thinking of Plato because of what I wrote here about love.  And Love.  It looks like I’m Platonic, no?  That I think there’s this universal form called Love, and that all the human things we call by that name are just shadows of it.  Imitations, and at that, only varying levels of partial.

I think that does describe what I think.  I’m pretty sure I have yet to experience or offer Love fully.  This doesn’t mean I think love with a lower case ‘l’ is bad or stupid.  I’m not zoroastrian, or whatever you call someone who thinks what we have in the flesh is evil.  I’m just saying I don’t think any of us loves completely, without at least a good dose of other-than-Love mixed in.  How’s that for a specific recipe?

What I’m not so comfortable with is equating that form of Love, that ideal that we can talk more about sometime, because I’d love to try to understand it better, with God.  Since we’re talking recipes, I think this is one for something bad.  Maybe even poisonous.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about the reason why I think this matters at all, or a lot, rather, which has everything to do with growing up.  It has to do with a process in which I think we’re all participating, more and less willingly, and with varying levels of success, which is coming to terms with life being not what we expect it to be.  Those who appear most deeply at peace, I mean far deeper than surfaces, seem to be those who have faced some pretty major challenges.  They seem to be those who have not skipped past their challenges, either, or been stoic or a forced kind of optimistic in the face of them, but rather have let themselves feel the confusion their challenges have naturally invoked, the consternation, the rage, the depression, the despair.  They’re people who have confronted the beast that is Life Isn’t What I Thought or Expected It To Be, and sat with it long enough to realize it doesn’t have to do them in.  That, in fact, they can make a sort of truce with this animal, which…might even move toward friendship.

It seems like in these kinds of people an ironic sort of lightness starts to grow–in spite of, but really also because of all they’ve been through–where bitterness and clenched-upness and mental and emotional fatigue begin to fade into something more like hope, and not a hope that has to be worked at, or conjured up, or willed and prayed into being.  It’s one that comes of its own accord.  Usually very quietly.  Even imperceptively, especially at the start.  And it doesn’t depend on everything going right from then on, either.  It doesn’t depend on people always coming through, or even God existing and being good, but rather on a deep down conviction that it’s okay.  That somehow, some important thing lives on.  Maybe a person–you, even, because God knows some of life’s challenges can make that look unlikely, or someone else you care about–but maybe something broader than that, like love in the world.  Like babies getting born and fed and raised.  Like sunlight being soft sometimes, and plants somehow knowing how to grow.  Like the cycle of water moving up into clouds and back down to earth and streaming to the places where it evaporates again.  Maybe it’s just inexplicable, an inexplicable sense that things will be okay, that what needs to happen somehow is.  Or will.

Whatever it is, whatever comprises this hope, I think these people have it.  And I think this thing that gives them hope is rarely something glorious or triumphant.  Their challenges have made that pretty impossible.  I think it’s edges are rusty, and there’s chips in its paint.  I think its hair is a little greasy and maybe it hasn’t brushed its teeth for a while.  And maybe it never had cool clothes to begin with, and especially not the right color socks. 

But it exists–it, this hope, this sense that something important lives on, and somehow, because of that, things are okay.  It exists in an earthy, un-plastic way, and can’t fall out of pockets or disappear if you look at it too directly.  It can’t get stolen by someone who says it’s stupid, or whose "it" is much bigger, or looks like something taken from a magazine cover.

It can’t get lost because it already has been, and was found again.  It already died, so it can’t get killed.  It’s already all dinged up, so there’s just no worry that it might get scratched.

But back to Plato.  And Love.  And God.

I think this same process of growing up in relation to life needs to also happen in relation to God.  I think there’s danger when it doesn’t, because an idealized version of God can’t stand on its own.  It has to be protected.  Fiercely.  The same things we do to people or circumstances that threaten the Life We Thought We Should Be Able To Live, we have to do to people who challenge our notion of God.  Ignore them.  Belittle them.  Berate them.  Talk bad about them, or people like them, behind their backs.  Patronize them.  Turn them into projects to try to make them see things our way.  Or work on some serious efforts at denial.

I wonder what would happen if we set God free in our minds to be whoever or whatever God is (and isn’t).  I wonder what would happen if religious people let their true feelings about God surface, their true questions and frustrations, and stepped out from under any obligation to believe God is any certain way, out from any work to have faith in God’s love, for example, or God’s power or personal presence.  I wonder what would happen if all the stuff we equate with our being good and faithful and making sure we have some reason left to hope or know among so many options how to live well got turned completely upside down, and the opposite of all of our definitions for such things got unveiled as being the real deal.

The God that would show up in such an upset, the God that would be left, I think would be a lot more like the hope that Peaceful people have.  A lot more like that Volvo that keeps driving 300,000 miles strong, and just doesn’t matter if someone opens a door into.  A lot more like something that needs little protection, and therefore is cause (or justification) for very few wars.

If you want to call that an ideal, a form, to use Plato-speak, so be it.  I think I’d prefer calling it lived, experienceable reality.

I think the process of growing up well involves coming to terms with things being far less perfect than we thought they should be, far less ideal, and learning to be okay with that, and to find beauty and wonder and that sparkly feeling in your chest and your fingertips that used to come from reading fairy tales not by imagining an ideal that exists outside of us, apart from us and this banged up thing that is our world, but by looking at what we’ve actually got, in and around us.  By looking at it deeply, being as honest as we can about what we see, and feel, and know.

I think the same is true of growing up in relation to God.

A very nice essay on shame, written by a gifted writer I met just recently, here.

I’ve been talking about bodies, and about the shame that so many of us feel in relation to them—about their size or appearance, their functions or lacks thereof, the experiences they have or haven’t had.  About how body wounds run deep.  I’ve been talking about an opening that seems necessary if we want our shame to go away, and how, unchristian that I am, I see this opening reflected in the Bible.  And I want to step away from the Bible for a minute to explain more fully what I think I’m trying to mean.  This is intuitive stuff here, in addition to stuff consciously thought, so I’m feeling my way along even as I write.

It seems to me that shame is about believing there is something inherently wrong with us, something we mostly can’t help (I say mostly because some shame circles around feeling like we should be able to help whatever it is that’s wrong with us, but just aren’t).  So helping shame fade is a matter of helping that belief in our messed-upness fade, and helping a new belief replace it.  One that’s something about us being fine, being actually good and loveable.  Not perfect, not in need of no growth or change or healing.  But fine.  Like in a fundamental way.  In a sense that envelops all of us, too—not just the clean parts or the nice parts or the parts we let other people see.  The sense I mean holds all of who we are.

So the question becomes, How does this happen?  How does the fading of this inherently-flawed belief happen, and the introduction and growth of a new and different one? 

This is where I think Love comes in.  I don’t think any of this can happen without it.  And this is where the opening I’m exploring comes in, too, because just like “fade” and “growth” imply, Love can’t zap shame instantly out of us.  At least as far as I can see.  It’s one of those laws of shame, I think:  must get undone slowly.

A few posts back I wrote about grace (here and here), and how maybe the experience of it is actually a stepping stone to realizing there isn’t any need of it, that the experience of grace is what helps us realize we actually do deserve kindness, actually do deserve love.  The experience of grace unravels in our minds the very reality of grace. 

So.  I think experiences of love are similar.  And I’m not capitalizing love here intentionally, because I’m meaning something other than Love, which to me means the most massive and unboundaried and flooring and simultaneously gentle stuff there is, whereas love means lesser versions of that, ones that are peppered with all the normal stuff of us:  gaminess, impatience, I’ll-love-you-if-you-love-me-back, limited understanding of the beloved and all they’ve been through, all they are, I’ll-love-you-if-you-stroke-my-ego-and-reassure-me-constantly-that-I’m-your-favorite-one, etc.  Experiences of love—this peppered-with-normal-human-stuff kind—are a stepping stone, I’m thinking, or at least can be one, to realizing and experiencing the reality of Love, and actually taking on more and more of It’s traits.  Love unravels love, if that makes sense.  It enlightens. Its light reveals love for what it is, which is less than Love, and in so doing, in the very same breath, reveals us for what we are.  And what I think it reveals is that we’re good.  Fundamentally so.  Fine, just exactly as we are.  And to repeat myself, I don’t mean in no need of healing, or growth, or change.  I mean fine in a fundamental sense, and therefore having nothing to be ashamed of.

So to be less heady about all of this, and more clear about what I mean by Love revealing us for what we are.  Let’s say I feel ashamed of being so tall, ashamed that this makes me so different from what I’ve got in my head is the standard of feminine beauty.  And let’s say I’m ashamed of the veins on my legs, too, that their ever-darkening, ever-multiplying-before-my-eyesness doesn’t strike me so well.  And maybe I wish I could dance better, too, and that I could jog, rather than only walk, because I have in my mind that jogging is more cool, and the back problems that keep me from doing so aren’t.  And that surgery on my toe?  It didn’t leave the nail looking so good.  And there’s a scar from where that mole got removed.  And where that baby was removed.  And maybe all my issues with my body—all the ones I might say in a note like this and beyond—spill over into issues with my personality and my education and my life experiences.  And maybe I try to downplay all of these things, all of the things I’m ashamed of, when I’m getting to know someone new.

Does any of this sound familiar?

But let’s say this person that I’m getting to know comes to love me.  Let’s say they’re not really paying much attention to these things I’m trying to hide.  Let’s say they’re noticing things they genuinely like about me, things they find charming.  And, let’s even say they may not like me so much—love me so much—if they knew my whole story.

But that’s the point:  they only love me.  They don’t Love me.  But you know what?  Their love alone, with a lower-case ‘l’, begins to heal me.  It speaks a different voice from the one(s) in my head and starts a new belief going:  maybe I’m loveable.

And maybe I’m lucky enough to find a friend who sees some of these parts I’m ashamed of, I mean truly sees them, and doesn’t turn away.  Maybe their love is actually big enough to hold some of those parts, maybe even big enough to demonstrate instinctually that no effort is actually required to love some them, because they’re fine.  Totally par for the human course.

So something starts to open up inside of me.  Some clenched up ball begins to loosen, and I start to realize that the love that felt so good at first, but that came on the condition that I don’t really show my whole self, wasn’t actually as big as this love I’m now being given.  Maybe this love has a bigger sort of ‘l’ at the front, is just a little less mixed up with all the stuff that’s less than Love.

So an opening starts to happen, where I start to recognize what Love is, and in It’s light, even if only a glimmer, I start to see that I’m loveable.  And when I start to feel loveable, I start to not have to hide so much, or at least so much of the time.  So a relaxedness starts to grow where worry used to be.  Fear of exposure and rejection starts to fray. 

When any of this happens, even just a tiny little bit, surely angels sing.

But here’s where I think we get in trouble, where this opening I’m talking about gets stalled up sometimes, and frozen uncomfortably close to closed:  when we mistake love for Love.  When we equate the two, and believe everything love has to say.  Which, at least in all my listening, isn’t altogether nice.  To put it mildly.  love is mixed up with all the things that make us real, which means things like shame and fear and lust and maybe a deep, deep need for control.  Its voices aren’t only about healing and making us whole.

I think this connects with the Bible.  I think the openings that are in it, the ones I described in that last post, that can deepen and widen our concept of Love, can be used to do the very opposite.  We can take what an opening reveals and equate what we see with Love, all the way, as though every veil has been lifted and the Whole Truth revealed.  We can say God = love, and obligate ourselves to reify some version of this, rather than look for ways that Love is being cracked open, pointing ever beyond our concepts of love.  I think we can do this with openings outside of the Bible, too.

The people I know who seem most deeply unashamed seem to be in a lifelong process of opening.  Love is always getting unveiled for them, veil off of veil, sometimes shockingly, sometimes disturbingly so.  Often in ways that shake up old categories.  This process seems to embolden and humble them at the same time.  They get more joyful and their voices more free.  It makes them looser, if you want to put it that way—less worried about being right and making sure they’re on the right side of boundaries and more concerned with living, and making safe space for others to do so, too—for all of us to live well.

love opens us up to Love, is what I’m trying to say.  Or has the potential to.  And I think it’s when we find ourselves inside Love’s reach, or at least start getting the hunch that that’s where we belong, when we discover ourselves to be inherently loveable, and therefore fundamentally good, our height and our weight and our shape and our smells and our bodily functions and the experiences we have and haven’t had; our sexual orientations and genders and (un)athleticism and (un)paired-upness with someone we love—everything that makes us such embodied creatures:  all of it starts being less and less grounds for fear and shame.  A new kind of core starts taking shape, I think, inside of us, and our wounds become that much less crippling.  They don’t define us any more.

Openings like these are becoming my guiding lights.  They’re what my body yearns for and my soul is drawn toward.  In the Bible, and anywhere else I can find them.

So about this opening.

Christian Scriptures talk a lot about God.  They talk a lot about people hearing God, worshipping God, speaking with and following God.  Tradition says these texts are inspired, too—are an authority for knowing what’s True.

And in this sense, I want to concur.  I want to stick with tradition.  And I want to talk about an opening that seems to me the heart of the Bible’s inspiration, the heart of Love, really, which is what will get us back to bodies, and what I think can help heal our shame.

Early biblical texts have God calling out a people.  Follow me, God says.  I want to bless you, and through you, everyone else too.  So Abram and Sarai start things off.  They leave everything familiar and follow.  From the very start you’ve got a Special People, and you’ve got a Holy will to bless everyone.

Time passes, and adventures do too, and pretty soon there’s wars being fought in God’s name.  Wars where the texts have God ordering them, ordering slaughter, destruction of entire groups to keep the Special People pure.  Mix with others and you never know what unholiness could happen.

Simultaneously, you’ve got provisions for the alien.  From the mouth of God.  Hospitality codes.  Honor codes.  The alien is not the enemy, God says.  In fact, the alien deserves kindness.  It’s a harsh world out there, a desert, if you want to put it that way.  Without your care they’ll die.

So there’s the Special People and there’s the plan to bless everyone and there’s the matter of racial purity and the sense that even aliens matter.  More than matter, they’re human.  In this, they’re just like you.  And you never know when you’ll need their care, too.

Time passes and the Special People get rich—the people who were slaves and wanderers early on.  They get rich and ignore the poor and take their Specialness for granted.  And the prophets come out scolding.  What do you think you’re doing? they say.  This inequity, this disregard for the vulnerable among you, this worshiping of idols—none of it’s God’s way!

So you’ve got the Special People and the will to bless everyone and the racial purity and the sense that aliens are part of us too.  You’ve got taking specialness for granted and abuse of wealth and power, and impassioned pleas (tirades) against such things.  You’ve got Special People nestled comfortably into their status, nestled at the “underlings’” expense, and voices crying out in the wilderness (or opulent abodes), “This is unholy!  This isn’t God’s way!”

Time passes and rich become poor.  “In” become “out” as the People lose temple and land.  There is much grief over what is lost, much confusion, much wishing for the good old days.  And angry words from prophets, saying This?  It’s actually your fault.  Forget Yahweh and He’ll chasten you.  Forget Him and He’ll send plagues!  He’ll take away everything you love and give what you barely can endure.  Forget Him long enough and you don’t want to know what He’ll do.  There are threats and there is blame and there is shape up or else.  And there is shape up and I’ll be wonderfully kind.  Bless you beyond measure.  A fearsome, fearsome God.

And more time and more stories pass.

And Jesus comes along.  A Special Person in every respect, but doing little by the book.  Or Book, rather, because different groups of Special People have determined an inspired set of laws, inspired interpretations of those laws, that make Jesus look, at least to many, more like Heretic than Holy, and the people he deems Special the very last, the very least of whom the People would expect.  To top his strangeness off, Jesus says, “I am the way.  No one gets to God except by me,” which by that point seems to mean no one gets to God except by widening the sphere of Special, widening the sphere of Holy and the sphere of the fall of grace, which ends up being a lot harder fall than the one from grace, because according to Jesus it’s God that does the falling this time, and it looks to a lot of People like God’s aim’s not too good.

And Jesus gets killed for this.  For his God talk.  For his politics, and his flattening of holy hierarchies.  He gets killed for being a man too many want to follow, and for the nature of that following, which doesn’t tip a tall enough hat to tradition, a tall enough hat to what’s expected of God’s People, let alone the people of Empire.

He gets killed.  Bang.  Or groan, rather, because he’s hung, up on a cross with criminals.  And he says, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” which again is that fall of grace, is that widening sphere of Love that holds the Jews and the Gentiles and the friends who ran away, who feared for their lives and in their flight began to grieve the most horrible grief of all, which is hope dying altogether.  The death of hope.

But the stories keep coming.  Jesus is alive again, and there’s people talking about him, and people getting changed by him—still, even after he died.  And there’s churches getting formed.  Institutions getting started.  And there’s books like Galatians, where people are scolded for obsessing over rightness again, books like James, where Love is more about acting than beliefs.  You’ve got Jesus stories getting told in the very contexts, among the very boundaried groups, his words seemed meant to undo.

This—this is inspiration as I see it.  Not a book transcribed from God.  Not a book where every story told is accurate depiction of God.  But a book that documents over so much time the way things are:  The way people look to and for God.  The way we feel special or unspecial, blessed or abandoned. The ways we protect our own, fear death, abuse wealth and power, make ourselves look good, or blame someone else when we can’t.  The ways we also hear that Voice, sometimes loud, sometimes hardly past a whisper, calling us out of ourselves, or at least the parts of ourselves that are afraid and self-righteous and elitist and…ashamed.  Out of our violence, that would put our very drives, our very elitism, our very need to be special at other’s expense, into the mouth of God.  Into the heart of God, which we turn around and make our standard for how hearts should be.

But that Voice.  It keeps calling.  It keeps turning upside down who we thought God would be.  It’s called from time immemorial, and seeds the whole Book, even as other voices, many other voices, do too.  There’s an opening along the way, I think, in individual stories, but also in the Story as whole, the human Story, to a Love that undoes violence.  And to what we often do to people who talk about, let alone try to live out, such a Love.

So as I see it, in this manner, in a strange and twisted sort of way, the scope of God’s blessing, or rather, the scope that people recognize of that blessing, truly is expanding through Abraham and Sarah.  The trajectory of the stories that got told and written down of them thousands of years ago, that unfolded into the ones from the last millennium, that partnered with so much adventure through time and speak in hearts today—the direction in which they point, and even sometimes lead, is toward an opening of God’s arms. Or rather, a recognition of the infinite wideness of those arms.  Like standing in a circle marked “God’s blessed ones”, watching what we thought were walls, or fences, or boundary lines around us, dissipate like fog in ever-widening circles.

And this—this recognition—is what makes possible the unbranding of shame I think.  The process—internal, alongside dear others, and as whole groups—that I think has to happen for us to know, not intellectually, but viscerally, that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with us.  With our bodies (since that’s, after all, what I’m aiming to speak of here).  That big boobs and long dicks and smooth skin and strong libidos and curves and muscles and hair in all the right places (and none of the wrong); that lack of disease and disability and early (or ongoing) abuse; that any of the things that make models look and seem to function like they do and standards for wholeness and sexiness and desirability what we think exist inherently—that none of this has anything inherent on the broader scope of who we actually are.  Which is real. Which is not standard.  Which is aging bodies of all shapes and textures and (dis)abilities and experiences and wounds and sizes.

I’m out of time and space right now to explain adequately what I mean by all of this, by this unbranding, and by the connections I’m trying to make between the opening I see in the Bible and the opening I think is necessary for shame to go away.  I’ll try to talk more on this next time.  I didn’t realize I had so much to say.

[Inspired by conversations on some of the blogs I read about heterosexuality, homosexuality, and the Christian tradition.]

In addition to so much else, bodies are sexual things.  At least for most of us, for a majority of our lives.  And there is something about our sexualness that’s close to our core, I think, something that makes sexual wounds run deep.  Deeper than bodies, even.  To be sexualized before we’re ready, or by the wrong people, to be molested or raped, to have unfulfilled longing, to have sexual parts that don’t look or work like we’d wish, to be thought undesirable by those we want desiring us, to be called, because of our desires, less than God’s ideal, or willfully depraved:  these are wounds that hit our core.  They hit the soft, impressionable places that tell us fundamental things about ourselves, the places where marks don’t quickly fade, where words, or even looks on people’s faces, are branding irons, and the flanks of our identities, our self-appraisals, unhelpably exposed.

And shame, in one form or another, is what I think the brands all say.  And shame is such an awful, awful thing, because it keeps us hiding, and therefore lonely—hiding sometimes literally, our body or our parts, hiding sometimes figuratively, our self-thoughts, our memories, expressions of our sexual beingness.  It keeps our wounds private.  It keeps us silent when we need to talk and urges us to silence those who do.  “Don’t bring that up,” we say.  It’s too hard to think about.  Too hard to see or deal with each other’s wounds, let alone our own.

I’m not a Christian right now in the ways many might define it, but my roots are there, and so is a lot of education, and it seems like the Christian Scriptures have a lot to say about related things.  In broad strokes, the Bible is a story of opening, I think.  A story of people opening, over time, and not in any straight or orderly fashion, to fuller understandings of love.  Or Love, rather.  And it’s Love that can unbrand our shame, I think.  It’s Love that can soften that marked up place inside of us, and impress it gently, tenderly, with something new.

I want to talk about this opening. 

I have a busy next few days, but when I get a chance to think after that, I want to put more words about this here.

Some of you might be interested in following my friend Dave as he reflects on McLaren’s New Kind of Christian.  Dave and I were in seminary together, and he comes at the emergent church movement, Christianity in general, and being Mennonite Brethren specifically in ways the majority in all three groups might find…interesting.  A few posts before the one that starts his book reflections is a piece about his spiritual journey that you might also like to read.