I Cannot Believe in a God of the Few - Original Poetry - My Response (in Part) to @papa-pepper's Spiritual Food 4 Thought Series
I have been enjoying @papa-pepper's series on Spiritual Food 4 Thought, which is right up my alley, as spiritual seeking has been a large part of my life since I was ten or eleven.
The double rainbow over my Rogue that greeted me upon leaving work this afternoon.
In the mid-1990s, before and during the period when my then-stepson was attending Moody Bible College, he and I would often have philosophical discussions until well into the night, and more than once he asked me to tell him my own beliefs.
He and his sister were raised fundamentalist Christian, and while I respect their faith, there are a number of tenets with which I disagree, and cannot pretend to adhere to. As I have stated before, I am a person of faith, but not of dogma.
The problem is that my own beliefs are not so easily categorized as "I'm a this," or "I believe in that," because as an individual, with my own often convoluted path through life, I've taken some odd and unusual spiritual turns that many with more conventional beliefs may not even understand.
As just one example, when I asked what religion she followed, my sister Carol had a singularly individual response: she belonged, as she said, to the Church of Carol.
The first time I recall having this conversation with her was when I was perhaps eight or nine, which at four years my senior, would have made her twelve or thirteen at the time.
Her take was that her beliefs came from a variety of sources, and while she believed in the order of the universe, and of a consciousness greater than ourselves, she could not limit herself to the conceptual angry God of the Old and New Testaments, which she considered to be largely the work of superstitious male scribes, a viewpoint with which I largely agree.
Personally,I find this view of God to be limiting, whereas I believe God to be both genderless and limitless.
Additional influences included the Native American legends and stories passed down to us from my mother and grandmother, of a world where everything was interconnected and interdependent, which just felt right from the start.
My mother had also studied archaeology in college, and her knowledge of world history and beliefs informed my spiritual progression as well, particularly as so many stories from the bible have their roots in much older stories from far more ancient civilizations.
Then, my father became a Buddhist when I was twelve, and though I ultimately decided that Buddhism wasn't my own path, it did in turn influence my path to a great degree, particularly since many of Yeshua's teachings have a strongly Taoist/Buddhist slant.
There are in fact a number of theologians and biblical historians who believe that Yeshua's so-called "Lost Years" may have been spent in India and Tibet studying Taoism and Buddhism.
I remember my father's initial consternation when I suggested that chanting was simply another form of prayer, which he initially denied, but ultimately came to grudgingly agree.
I was also influenced over time by the beliefs of a number of friends and acquaintances, whose religions and beliefs spanned the gamut, each of which had something real to offer, but none of which, in my mind, held the answer in its entirety.
I have thus long held that each faith holds a piece of the puzzle, but none have a lock on the truth, or on the solutions we each need as individuals, much less collectively as one planet.
I also did a number of serious bible studies over the years, each one of which pointed to the simple fact that, while most Christian churches say that they believe in the word of Yeshua, most fail to actually teach his true teachings, or even a substantial portion of them, much less follow them.
And the gospels themselves frequently contradict one another, particularly with regard to miracles, which are largely absent in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and then when John burst upon the scene, lo and behold, a miracle on every page!
And then there is Saul/Paul, who Carol maintained never really converted, but remained in Roman employ the whole time; which actually makes sense, when you realize that it was Saul/Paul who first took Christ's teachings and began teaching the opposite. Repeatedly.
Please understand, I am denigrating no one's faith; these are simply my own observations based upon my own spiritual path and meandering studies, which included a boatload of the history of the early church, and any or all of which you are free to toss aside if you disagree.
I am not seeking converts.
I did ultimately cease self-identifying as a Christian, which encompasses a number of tenets I flatly do not believe, and began simply calling myself a follower of Yeshua, which is to say his of actual teachings.
I have also ticked off more than one self-professed Christian, by responding to the question of whether I have accepted Christ as my personal savior by saying that I accept him fully as my rabbi, which literally means teacher. No one said I was politically correct.
So back to responding to my stepson's questions, not surprisingly, I found my easiest expressions to come through my poetry, and I wrote a number of poems over the years in response.
This is one of my favorites, which explains, to a large degree, why the majority of churches have never felt like home to me, because I do not have, and have never had, an "Us against Them" mindset. Nor did Yeshua.
I Cannot Believe in a God of the Few
Condemning the souls of the Many
My reason insists
That this cannot be true
For His love is eternal and plenty
Hate is the ruse
Of the faithless man
Believing himself undeserving
And holding below him
The countless souls
With faith neither strong nor unswerving
But I hold before me
Compassionate God
Amused at my fumblings apparent
Loving and kind
In the tenderest way
Forgiving me when I am errant
For all His creation
Must something destroy
Destruction can be a thing grand
Consider volcanoes
Destroying themselves
In process creating new land
My soul is consumed
With the fires of love
Which leaves my heart painful and raw
Yet as the ash settles
And soon falls away
What's left is the love of God's law
God's law can be summed up
In one single word
And Love is the word that is meant
His law is but Love
In its purest form
The Original Element
I cannot believe
There is only one way
To honor and worship God
If that were the truth
We would all be the same
And this world unspeakably odd
But God in His wisdom
Made each one unique
Both in how we view Him above
And in our great challenge
That noblest of quests
Creating yet new ways to Love.
1999
The same double rainbow, observed enroute to my home, over Hwy 111
This post, and all those from now until the end of 2018, I am dedicating to the work of #tarc and #yah, aka @rhondak's nonprofit dog rescue and @sircork's charity @youarehope.
Half the liquid proceeds earned from my posts will be evenly split between the two organizations.
Both photos were taken by me today using my Samsung Note 8 smartphone.
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art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics
Cori, this is soooo good. You echo many of my own concerns about the Christian faith, as well as my unwavering belief that Yeshua is who he says he is, but NOT who most men say he is. Thank you so much for sharing this.
I always loved that he was a peacemaker, and not the warrior messiah that had been foretold . . . to me, peace is more powerful than war, love will always triumph over hate (which is usually fear in disguise), and creation will always win in the end over destruction.
I also love that he treated the women around him with respect, that he repeatedly sought them out despite that being a major taboo in that place and time, and that was one of the major reversals by Saul/Paul, who demanded that women be lesser and subservient to men, which Yeshua never said even once.
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Exactly. He was a people-person, too, surrounded by lots of friends, and they had some good times. They weren't pious and sober they way they're so often depicted. He went into the taverns and "unholy" places and mingled with everyone. Totally different personality than depicted by mainstream dogma.
Precisely.
Not to mention that, since he was called rabbi by his followers, he HAD to be married, since ONLY married men are eligible to become rabbis, and that rule was sacrosanct, as in fact it still is to this day for Orthodox Jews.
And it is pretty clear that, since he was married, he was pretty obviously married to Mary Magdalene, since she was clearly his most trusted confidante, and stated to be such in more than one apocryphal gospel.
Additionally, it was to Mary Magdalene that his body was entrusted, and the only women allowed to touch the body of a dead Jew were his mother or his wife. Unmarried women were not allowed such intimacy with the dead.
Which is one of the first things the church sought to bury, since the last thing they wanted was to foster the Mary cult, which was huge even by the third century . . . in fact, in the fifth century, nearly all female priests and preachers, of which there were many, were summarily rounded up and murdered. An entire generation of women teachers, healers and preachers gone . . . and almost no historians even touch on this.
Which is also, historically, when the church "decided" that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, despite most theologians worth their salt agreeing that she was not only not a prostitute, but a woman of good family and means, who may very well have been the one financing their travels.
I'm one of those inconvenient sorts who has actually studied translations of the earliest known texts, and compared them with the miracle-filled gospels that came to be "approved" by the church, which bear only superficial resemblance to the originals.
To me, the real miracle of Yeshua is that he was a genuinely good and loving man in a truly hard and difficult time, who sought to empower others and lift them above the circumstances in which they found themselves, by reminding them of who they really were . . . "Know ye not that ye are gods?"
Yeshua's real message was not that the only way to God was through him, but that we can ALL do the things he did: "These and even greater things shall ye do."
Sure. miracles are possible, and I've had enough occur in my own life to know that they are real. But I don't need miracles, especially Johnny-come-lately added-on miracles, to know that he was the real deal.
He's my brother, a fellow child of the Divine, in a real and palpable sense.
OOOH! You have no idea how close I came to saying THE SAME THING about Mary Magdalene!!!! My conscience just doesn't hold with him living a lonely and celibate life. Since when is marriage sinful, anyway? The bottom line is that I couldn't care less whether he was or wasn't married, outside of hoping he was for his own sake. But does it factor in my opinion of his Divinity? Not one iota. :-)
Which is, in the end, the entire point - his message was, and is, that we are ALL divine, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, or to "accept the mission."
(Cue "Mission Impossible" theme)
;-)
Yes!