For our entire existence, humans have lived with two realities: the religion of empire and the religion of creation. The religion of empire is a kingdom, ruled through the lens of Individualism and fueled by the fear of scarcity. The religion of creation is a kin-dom, ruled through the lens of relatedness and fueled by the generosity that is love.
When pastors retire after a lifetime of service to the church, they often preach a last sermon unfettered by concerns for continued employment. It is the sermon “they always wanted to preach” but were afraid to, lest some big contributor take her money and leave the building. Clergy are, by and large, not a particularly courageous lot.
Ever since the first mind countenanced an unknown source of benevolence, religion has held us together as powerfully as it has driven us apart.
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.
Here we are, immersed in a swirl of biospheric breakdown and societal strife that isn’t going away; in fact, it’s getting worse. The darkness and distress cannot be passed off as the wrath of an angry God. Rather, we ourselves are at cause, and these are the real end times.
We live in a world defined by the cheapness of human life, indeed, all life. Migrants and refugees are treated no better than the Amazon rainforest. And yet, as entanglement shows us and as the tolling bell reminds us, all is One.
Recently, I was in consultation with a colleague who is First Nation Cree. Throughout the conversation, there was a steady stream of confidence, curiosity, and hope. Really smiling at one point, my colleague said, “I’m an eternal optimist who comes from a history of despair.”
I walked out of our church in ritual silence with the procession at twilight and was met—stunned—by the radiant face of the nearly full moon. I started to weep. Especially tired this particular Maundy Thursday, I was hit by the welling up of unprocessed emotion from a particularly hard year.
Recently, a half-dozen young people in our small town organized a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration. The march was seen by some as an intrusion of threatening other-worldly politics into our predominantly (99.8%) white town and riled up a lot of emotional responses on social media.