Healing Wounds From Our Ancestor, Abraham

Wouldn't it be a nice move toward world cooperation if we divided the Sabbath into the three days that coincide with the three religions that seek to honor them?

Businesses could give Muslims the day of rest on Fridays until just before dusk (perhaps beginning on Thursday at sunset). The same businesses could give Jews the day of rest between just before dusk on Friday until nightfall on Saturday, and the Christians would be given their day of rest between nightfall on Saturday and dusk on Sunday.

In this manner, each of the branches (spiritual cousins) of the family of Abraham would be able to take the serving places of each other on the individual's Sabbaths. This could also be the case on the holy days celebrated by each "sect" of Abraham's religious descendants.

Good-bye to Gods and Goddesses

Nothing angers me more than the people who take for granted that my daughter will watch me die as they simply sign checks for my medical care. My daughter studies long and hard to be a professional, award-winning teacher of children, not a nurse's aid. She will not give up her vocation to tend my body as it turns to earth's fertilizing ash.

I hate goddess mythology almost more than I hate god mythology. The problem, as I see it, is that both women and men refuse to be fully understood, so they are always seen as something other than human. I want to be neither adored nor enslaved; I want to be known and loved as I really am.

My husband used to complain that all the neighbors who had lived beside him for years when I met him never even invited him in for a cup of coffee, though they all came to tell me what a hero he was as a doctor. It occurred to me that this was because they saw him as above them, a god, not a flesh and blood human being. Gods really don't need anything, and what we have to offer would surely be too inferior to be accepted.

Gods and goddesses have no needs. They are magic beings that can pull fulfillment of the wishes of others out of the air. It is so much easier to believe this myth than to watch for what a person really hungers for in his or her life and seek to partner with him or her in filling the most basic desires.

I have had husbands who treated me as each, within different marriages; I will not settle for either way of treatment in this last partnership in my life. I want my husband to be my life partner, as I have been to him, in every way humanly possible, including the shit, piss, and blood of my illnesses and old age.

We have convinced ourselves that there are gods and goddesses outside of us that need our sacrifices and adoration, while ignoring the cries of those who carry The Sacred Spirit in their earthly bodies. How convenient it is to imagine that there are births without blood and god babies without dirty diapers! Only a bunch of celibates and royalty with slaves to serve their real bodily needs could dream up such drivel.

I never saw my menstrual blood as sacred, as I'm sure any women who don't deeply desire motherhood would not. Neither do I see semen as sacred, where wasting a drop is sacrilege. We are all simply animals with the choice to be more than creatures of our genetics and histories. Making these choices is what turns homo sapiens into full humans

I want nothing more than to be treated as an equal in relationships, balancing my weaknesses and strengths with those of my partners. Is this too much to ask while I remain on this physical plane called our earth?

Fear-Free Faith

I recently finished reading "Unbroken" in which religious zealotry replaced PTSD. Does psychic/spiritual peace require that we erase what we know, that which we wish to forget? Must we deny what we heard with our own ears and what we have seen with our own eyes?

I also recently went, with a lifelong friend, to see the movie "The Giver," in which a utopia was developed where only one person in the community was allowed to remember anything. I, for many years, held this position in the lives of many family and friends. How convenient it is for others to confess their pain and/or sins to one person and simply walk away, unburdened.  I can attest to the great burden it is to be the sole crier in the wilderness of denial. Is there any thought to how heavy the baggage of the confessor has become?

Prophecy comes from insight into the past. Anyone who believes that prophecy is a gift has never been the one to whom that ability was given. Those who wish to deny their past memories will kill the prophet rather than face the inevitability of repetition in those who will not remember. I wonder if prophets wish they could shake off what they know and awaken with innocence, once again? I know I wish that I could. Maybe a lobotomy is in order.

How will homo sapiens ever stop repeating the stories of our past murderous mistakes unless we are willing to look squarely and honestly at all of them? Because the history of humanity continues to circle back on itself, in generation after generation, doesn't mean that we are doomed to act as simple-minded animals, following the blind faith of our fathers and mothers. In order to save The Sacred Spirit in our universe, we must all stop and critically look at what we have become and how we got where we are.

Religions that enforce rules with inflicting fear have been the norm since the beginning of what we know of homo sapiens. Isn't it time that we stop confusing awe in The Almighty with fear of a punishing father (or mother)?

The Pharisees and those that came from them believed in a spiritual life, as well as a physical life, while on earth and for eternity. Religious practice was bound by rules and rituals, but these rules and rituals did not necessarily bind or define the spirits of the adherents. The spirit of every act we inflict on another is carried into the generations that follow us, not only in eternity, but on our shared earth. How many more generations of hatred and war will it take until we "get it"?

I seems imperative to me that we stop looking for The Sacred Spirit outside of what we see and hear in each other and our physical earth. This would be the best way to honor The Spirit that is perishing for lack of our understanding about our earth. What we have and what we see and hear is a part of the continuum of creation. What we bind here is bound in eternity; what we loose here is lost in eternity. Our negative actions may be denied, but their consequences are not loosed with the denial of our painful memories. The energy infects our earth and spreads.

I have been bound by fear for much too long; I have loosed my fear in favor of awe in what I see and hear all around me. It is not with fear, but with great sadness that I observe so many who insist on dragging others to "faith" through fear. In my belief system, there is no death; there is only metamorphosis, so there is no fear of the end of this manifestation of my energy on earth. My energies, both positive and negative will go on in the universal entities that I have impacted. My hope is that what I give will be received as more blessings than curses, for many generations in the future.

It is very freeing to fear not life or what others see as death. I also have no fear of my future in this physical manifestation or whatever manifestations come next. My mission is simply to be available, if and when called to be a blessing. I am finally free from religion and have found fear-free faith!

What if We Women...?

What if we women raised traditionally could take a year off from being anybody's anything and find out who we really are underneath all the "shoulds"? Who would we be? How would we act?

Not the Nicene Creed

I have been asked if I believe in the Nicene creed; the answer is that I do not. I am suspicious of anything created by the Roman church hierarchy in partnership with political power, as was the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed seems to me a one upsmanship in the religious power game.

I believe in God, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. (To put one human face on The Sacred Spirit diminishes the majesty of The Sacred Spirit's manifestations throughout the universe.)

And in Jesus Christ, his only son, our lord. (I believe that all who have ears to hear and eyes to see The Sacred Spirit share in the same Spirit that Jesus embodied on earth and freed up at Pentecost. We are told that Jesus said he was not our lord, but our brother and friend.)

Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, (as are all conceived in love).

Born of the virgin Mary. (I don't believe that virgin births were physically possible then. Even if a child is conceived without sexual intercourse, the act of giving vaginal birth breaks the seal of the womb, the hymen. I believe the fixation on virginity makes a travesty of the true process of sexual intercourse, gestation, and bloody births attended by frightened fathers.)

Suffered under Pontius Pilot, was crucified, dead and buried. (The fixation on the last three days of the life of Jesus are the stuff of warrior mythology. Jesus was a joyful Jew for many years; this is where I put my focus.)

On the third day, he rose again (who cares whether this was in his body or simply in the power presence those who loved him felt when they were gathered together?) and thence will come to judge the living and the dead. (While we live, we share our positive and negative power with all those we encounter. This energy lives on, so there is no need for judgement. It is all an eternal balancing act that we have no way to know, nor should we, how it ends.)

I believe in the Holy Ghost (Sacred Spirit), the Holy Catholic Church (not Roman catholic), the communion of saints (as all have the ability to be to some), the forgiveness of sin (through human restitution) and life everlasting (through metamorphosis). *This is what I believe.*

Jesus, the Man, as Mensch

Should we stop allowing only science to define when actual humans came into being? Should we redefine what it is that makes a member of the group of animals called homo sapiens fully human? Would we do anything differently, as a group of animals with varying abilities, if we placed new rules on human society and civilization? What if we stop believing that all homo sapiens are fully human?

I submit that what we need to use as the basic criteria for being fully human is responsible, committed compassion, where an individual is willing to give over one's own survival to the survival of the responsibly compassion of the next generation. This would mean a definition of species/tribe by practiced values, not by blood, baptisms, rituals, or creeds. I await the day that we think through who is in our species/tribes, rather than acting on ancestral memory which exacts unthinking loyalty and revenge, or on our animal instincts of survival of the most physically fit.

My Jewish friends are fond of the Yiddish word "Mensch." My understanding is that this is the highest designation for a fellow member of the species homo sapiens. It translates to "a real human." We need to look back at all the erudition of the Jews, and the fact that Jesus came from a long line of this people. Is there anything higher to which a homo sapiens can aspire than to be a real "mensch?" This is what I believe Jesus came to show us how to be.

Free From Feelings

A story about our mother was told to me by one of my sisters; I think this explains a lot of my frustration with people and teamwork. The story goes that, when my sisters descended on our mothers disastrous mess of a home in order to prepare it for a huge family function, my mother crawled under the sink and began to clean the pipes with a toothbrush. How many people are so overwhelmed by the vast mess we see on our earth that we spend our whole lives under the sink, polishing the pipes that are working just fine in their present states?

They have no idea how to plan for a party and they won't ask anyone else for a plan because that would make the planner 'the boss." They all simply wander around without direction looking for some tiny detail on which to concentrate all their energies. Quite often they are busy feeding baby birds that have fallen out of trees while their own children scream in their cribs.

This is how I experience prayer: It seems to me that people are simply polishing their crowns for the future that they imagine will be so much better than this one, without ever rolling up their sleeves to straighten up the present mess. I can never understand how heaven will be any better than earth since humans will still be their individual selves after death. I prefer to think that all my energy will be reabsorbed by the Big Bang going backward into the pureness of a Universal, Eternal, Shimmering, Shared Sacred Spirit of Pure Life.

I am frustrated because all those who I had hoped would be part of this party are too busy polishing their own individual pipes (or crowns) to help prepare for the party. Even when I peek under the sink to ask if they need anything, they seem to think I'm spying on them and may somehow steal some of the shine off their pipes. They hide their toothbrushes and tell me to go find my own pipes to polish. So I do, and then they are unhappy because my pipes are now made into a pipe organ that is inviting too may to come hear the music.

When I turn to the kitchen to cook, and give the pipe organ over to others, they become angry because I "think I'm better than them" even though I am now serving the rest of them, as if I am a slave. They then invite me to celebrations at which I am told that I can't have any of what they are serving, and are angry when I get hurt feelings over this.

The only conclusion I can come to is that they don't want me at their parties, even in the hereafter. This is okay because I don't want to be in my own little house, with my own lonely crown, competing for who sits longest on Daddy God's lap or who is on the right or left hand of King Jesus, for all eternity. I simply want to be absorbed, with all those I have loved, back into the Sacred Spirit from which I believe I came. They don't want to do this with me; that's okay, but it still hurts my feelings. I hope not to have any feelings in eternity.