There. I said it. I know I’m not the first, and I surely won’t be the last. It’s time to embrace and promote. My way of proclaiming the good news of psychedelic plant medicines as part of our salvation and healing is writing.
Namasté: “The Divine in me honors the Divine in you.” In my way of seeing it, namasté includes the understanding that we all are one.
I lost a very dear friend the day after Christmas.
I look, out of habit, out of longing, out of love, really, but he is not there. It is as if his singular space – the very soft shape of kindness within my world – has been cut out.
It has been shown that wealth actually changes the structure of a person’s brain, destroying a sense of empathy for others while at the same time creating a sense of entitlement.
What is a heart alive with compassion and joy and spontaneity? A heart not continually weighed down by drivenness, anger, and fear? A heart at rest?
In his book “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology”. The Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng says, “God is the very manifestation of a love that is so extreme that it dissolves existing boundaries.” So, it seems to me, living a life that dismantles existing boundaries is the very definition of being in relationship with God.
One of the many ways to read the Bible is to view it as God’s autobiography.
In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1945 that the Western world was on the precipice of a new era, an era without religion. God, as the “answer” to unsolvable questions, was continually being put out of a job as science continually extended the boundaries of human knowledge.
From Ezekiel to Jesus to the voices of the gospels, the proclamation is clear: civilization will not, indeed cannot, survive if wealth and power, and therefore food and shelter, are in the possession of but a few. Equally so, democracy will not and cannot survive if the bullies are allowed free reign.
Such is the looking at the figures in the crèche scene at the birth of Jesus. The crèche is a window into the eternal quality of the now, an icon of the divine point of view. It is the slack-jawed, timeless, aimless, free, worshipful Awe that is Love that is God.