I have spent my life working on the inside of organized religion, even though my love/hate relationship with most God-talkers makes me an outsider.
The Bible is a mirror. In it, we see the structure of our psyches. We see the scaffolding of our spirituality. What makes the Bible holy is not that it is the “word of God”, but rather that so many of its passages offer such breathtakingly vivid reflections of the journeys of our souls.
Now, more than ever, is the time to express our faith forthrightly, publicly, and invitationally.
As if we don’t already have enough problems in this country, the last few years have seen us slipping closer and closer to becoming a “post-truth society.” Facts just don’t seem to matter anymore.
One of the many ways to read the Bible is to view it as God’s autobiography.
Using the word “god” to conjure an all-powerful deity with biblically-proportioned prejudices and condemnations is dramatically different from using the word “god” to call us to a “no matter what” sort of love. I talk about this a lot. About ditching archaic language. About reading more than just the Bible or not reading the Bible at all.
The Bible has a political agenda. Even with all the different writers who contributed to different books, there is a clear biblical bias against the powerful using their places of authority to step on those who are already suffering. That’s political.
I’m really interested in how we, and by we I mean seekers, teachers, preachers, clergy, laymen, mystics, atheists and everything in between, think and talk about the divine feminine.
We know enough about politics to know when an idea’s time has come. We know enough about the principles that move and motivate people. They are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago. They are those universal principles found in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: fear, safety, community, belonging, status, esteem and actualization (another word for “becoming” or, possibly, “salvation”).
The wild calls. That which we associate with the wild are those ‘spontaneities’ found in ever form of existence in the natural world, that which is uncontrolled by human dominance. Wild is that feral autonomy of the more-than-human world with an agency and feathered intelligence of its own. The wild flares forth in the numinous powers of the psyche, mirroring the wild and raw powers of the universe. The wild is pure nature, that which is completely uncontrolled by human consciousness or dominance.