Tag Archives: gospel

Book Release, Christian art, culture, faith, Jesus of Nazareth, writing

Moving Back into the Light

My apologies to you all for disappearing for so long! I’ve been battling a bizarre antibiotic-resistant infection picked up at a hospital last year, and have been unable to work for many months, but I’m slowly improving.

I’ve spend untold hours working on digital mosaics and computer busywork (since I haven’t had the wit to write), but at least I’ve accomplished one thing: I’ve finished transcribing my 1993 PhD dissertation and uploaded it to academia.edu. The title is:

Native American Shields, Old Symbols for a New Spiritual Quest in the Contemporary Women’s Movement

and if you’re interested, you can find it at:

https://www.academia.edu/37357137/

SBTS Graduation, 1993

 

The dissertation was based on a summer’s on-site research with Euro-American women raised in the Church who were attending workshops on Native American spirituality–specifically to build shields. I interviewed 40 women about their reasons for leaving the Church and choosing a Native American spiritual path, using Marion Woodman’s revisions of Jungian psychology to analyze the interviews and shield images. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Meinrad Craighead provided critiques of the Church from within. I concluded with a my own Jungian critique of the Church–and suggestions for constructive change.

Although 25 years have passed, the issues are still current, as are the women’s responses to the pain they experienced in the Church. My own thoughts have grown and changed in the passing years, but I still find myself content to stand by what I wrote then. Below is an edited version of the dissertation’s final chapter. You can also find it here, where I’ve uploaded a number of the photos I took of the shield workshops (see drop-down menu under Native American Shields, above). Descriptions of the workshops are in the dissertation.

Brooke Medicine Eagle

 

 

I dreamed I saw a giant tree, branches bare and cold, blown by the winds from place to place, rootless, tumbling across the plains. It stood precariously for a moment, and then fell with almost deliberate slowness, and in its fall it crushed beneath its branches the vast and delicate wings of a golden butterfly. As the butterfly died, its wings broke into brittle fragments and blew away like leaves in a winter wind. The great barren tree tumbled on, coming to rest at last, upright, supported by the strength of a living tree, caught and held by their intertwined branches.

Individuals are sometimes blessed with dreams that reach beyond the limits of their own lives into the heart of the reality that surrounds them. I believe the dream above to be such a gift. In it I felt as if I were seeing with the eyes of a woman like the one from my research, below, who experienced violence at the hands of the Church:

The Church kills dreams in women. It does it ruthlessly, without concern or love . . . Any woman who says she does not feel massive pain in this society and in the Church is living a lie, or she’s just burying it. It will surface, or it will kill her (“Leslie”).

The tree of my dream is a broken remnant of Meinrad Craighead’s “tree which lives at both ends.” The divine energy of the mind has been disconnected from the energy of the body, and the restless movement of masculine aggression has abandoned its roots in “God as mother of the entire fabric of creation.” The great barren institution of the Church rolls across the Earth, rootless, a truncated cross rather than a living tree, impersonal and uncaring in its destruction. Driven by the winds of arid masculinity, it crushes the fragile and beautiful butterfly of women’s hopes for transformation, scattering those hopes and women’s shattered lives to the winds, leaving women to search alone in the wilderness, without any visible paths, for the presence of the One in their lives.

Meinrad Craighead, “Tree of Life” http://www.meinradcraighead.com/

Although the dream scene is a wintry one, still it holds out hope for the spring. The rootless tree is caught and held upright by the strength of a second tree firmly rooted in the Earth, its branches locking the barren tree in a complex embrace, pressing the barren trunk into its own contact with the Earth. In the terms of the previous chapter’s discussion, the living tree could symbolize the living Church—the flowering Church—wherever it is found, as well as other living traditions, such as the Native American, which draw deep sustenance from the fertile, feminine Earth. The grafting of such Earth-affirming energies into its life embodies the strongest hope for the reflowering of the Church.

The two questions asked at the beginning of the previous chapter hang heavy in the silence of the dream. Can the Church affirm the balanced symbolization of the Holy in images and rituals that do reverence to both the feminine and the masculine? Can the Church affirm women’s unique insights into the central mystery of the Christ? The answers are not yet clear. As the women interviewed emphasized in their responses, the first necessary step is the recognition of fully realized feminine wholeness in the Church and in the nature of the One. Without the presence of this feminine wholeness—not the depotentiated feminine of Christian tradition—neither reconciliation with the Church’s lost women nor the healing of its own wounds can be found.

Women seeking religious meaning through Native American spirituality seek the same essential treasure: their feminine Beingness, the feminine God-image in their hearts. At this time the Church does not offer its women any reliable access to the specifically feminine matrix of life. Without a structured means of access to the feminine within the Church, most women who are able to articulate their need will simply drift away, as those interviewed for this research have done—embittered, shattered, grieving, relieved, or simply abandoning an irrelevant piece of history, as each woman’s experience may be. In many cases they will take Jesus with them, alive in their hearts, but no longer related to the structures of the Church. But until they are able to affirm their essential femininity, they cannot encounter him as the bridegroom, the creative masculine within, the self-sacrificing guide to the feminine face of the One. And unless the Church offers pathways to the feminine within its own doctrines, few of these women will seek the bridegroom there.

Although the Church has treasured up the most significant life-preserving mystery of the Western world, it faces the catastrophic possibility that the life may be draining away from its symbols more rapidly than the Church can apply remedies. Dissatisfied women represent a movement away from the Church that has its echoes in rapidly diversifying New Age phenomena, the emerging men’s movement, and deep ecology. People speak glibly of a contemporary paradigm shift, not realizing what such a shift might mean. If a paradigm shift is primarily away from old patterns of reality, without containing within itself the balanced fullness of a new paradigm, disaster could result. The abandonment of traditional religious structures without firm alternatives to replace them would, as Jung saw clearly, bring catastrophic chaos to society.

Unless the Church can open itself to re-experience the numinous heart of its message in symbols that speak to the needs of the contemporary age, then it cannot offer itself to the world as the living body of Christ. The urgent need of the industrialized West is for wholeness within and without: the balancing of masculine and feminine and the sacred marriage that leads to authentic encounter with the face of the One manifested within each human being and in the whole of embodied reality. In the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Church has preserved this life-engendering mystery, but it has severed it from the Earth, and from the balanced wholeness of humanity’s most authentic experience of the Holy.

It is futile for the Church to try to respond constructively to critiques of its institutional structures without seeking to change the spiritual and psychological bases of those structural problems. Most of the respondents in my research could not conceive of a Church free of the destructiveness they had experienced within its walls. I believe this inability to imagine ecclesiastical change is rooted primarily in despair over the Church’s doctrinal bases, and only secondarily in pain resulting from its institutional abuses. If the Church were to address Christian women’s despair at its ultimate source—in patriarchal formulations of the nature of deity and women’s insignificance in that masculine equation—the abuses could be transformed through a natural process of growth. Embrace of the feminine matrix of life could move in organic procession toward reverence for the embodied cosmos and awareness of its participation in the Holy.

Meinrad Craighead, “Vessel” ( http://www.meinradcraighead.com/)

Like Meinrad Craighead, each Christian woman who confronts her pain and chooses to remain in the Church faces a long and lonely struggle for possession of her soul. In a recent letter, one respondent still struggling to stay in the Church wrote the following:

I still believe in the Church, but I see my sister clergywomen worn down by carrying the pain of the churches and their own pain, and that of their sisters in the pews. I watch knowing that I will not go back until I can see a way to work in the middle of that pain . . . . I feel like the support and teachers I need are out there (based in other traditions], and that eventually I will find enough of a vision to reenter parish ministry (“Elizabeth”).

Singly, in small groups, and sometimes in community, such women are spinning strong and supple anchors for a new web of wholeness. Each weaves her own experiences into those of her sisters, connecting hopes and personal symbols into the outer ring of a spreading web, working steadily inward toward the center, in spite of personal storms and human destructiveness.

For a woman who has birthed a shield, that center may be held by the power of her shield’s vision, a reminder of a beckoning presence encountered in the wilderness or within her own soul. A shield captures a vision of wholeness, sometimes with the fullness of the masculine complementarity, sometimes emphasizing the feminine alone. Like any true symbol, a shield that touches a woman’s depths will continue to draw her in, pulling her forward toward the Self as long as she remains creatively engaged with her journey to the center it symbolizes.

Jungian psychology bids a woman turn inward to listen to the voice of her deepest Self, and, having heard, to manifest her experience in the physical world, through writing, artistic production, or dance. Native American wisdom pushes a woman out into the created world to experience the call of the One and to bring that encounter to physical expression through song, dance, ritual movement, and the creation of spiritually significant ritual objects. Native America meets Jungian psychology at the center of the mandala, at the midpoint of the flowering cross of Christ, where spirit incarnates in flesh, and flesh embodies spirit.

Meinrad Craighead, “Tree at the Crossroads”
http://www.meinradcraighead.com/

The Church must rediscover its true center in the ecstasy of immanence as well as transcendence if it is to embody the mystery of incarnation for the world. Women seeking participatory ritual in worship are reaching out with a true human instinct for experience of the wholeness of the One. The danger confronting them is that without the structured guidelines of proven traditional paths, they may fall into fascination with the psychic numinosity of  destructive complexes—rather than with the creative pull of the Self.

Traditionally, the mysteries of the Church have facilitated experience of the One through such proven paths; however, the patriarchal bias of those mysteries has distorted human reality to such an extent that a critical mass of spiritual anguish has been achieved in the contemporary Western world. The paradigm is shifting, whether we will it or not. As the old consensus dissolves and social fabric unravels, American society is being split by those straining to cover themselves with the tatters of receding traditions and by those eager to push ahead into new revelation.

This split characterizes the contemporary American Church just as it characterized Mediterranean religious expression in the New Testament period. The cross of Christ, however, in its paradoxical fullness, fully supports neither of these opposing energies: it offers a point of reconciliation at its heart. It preserves the Law down to the last jot and tittle, while demanding new wineskins for the new wine of the Creative Spirit. It introduces a sword of separation into the most intimate fellowship, but draws all humanity to itself in love. It marks the intersection of proven and reliable old roads of tradition with the ongoing creative paths of the One, who is eternally making all things new. The essence of Christ’s message for the world is found in the paradoxical presence of both ancient wisdom and newness of life born from his passion and resurrection. The yoke of Christ to which the Church is called is a double one, harnessing polar opposites in creative tension: immanence with transcendence, masculine with feminine, flesh with spirit, light with dark, death with life.

As I opened my sacred circle to the surrounding forest at the completion of the vision quest that birthed the concluding chapters of this dissertation, the setting sun created a glowing shield from a previously unseen spider’s web. The hoop of the web was perfect in its roundness. The dying shaft of light that turned the web to flame illuminated only a few radiating strands, etching a golden cross against the shadowed trees, a cross that reached its arms out to touch the web’s circle at the four points of the medicine wheel. The web only glowed for a moment before the shaft of light was lost among the shadows, but it burned its image into my heart as a symbol of the longed-for wholeness of all visible and invisible being: the cross of Christ woven into the luminous heart of Creation.

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Christian art, culture, faith, Jesus of Nazareth, nativity, Yeshua

A Christmas Prayer

Last year about this time I posted a visual prayer in response to the what seemed to me the inhumanity and lack of compassion emerging from the newly elected American administration.
 
This year I find myself struggling against despair, but still praying. I don’t understand how we have gotten so muddled. What happened to “For God so loved the world”? Or “neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female”? “Let justice roll like a river”? or God’s desire is for us “to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before him”?
 
Here again is “A Christmas Prayer,” for the incomprehensibly deep divine love we celebrate at Christmas to fill all our hearts, and open our eyes to the wideness of God’s mercy, encompassing the whole of Creation.

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Christian art, culture, faith, Jesus of Nazareth, writing, Yeshua

A Season of Hope

 

Fallen tree in the shape of a woman

 

I’ve just released my first ever YouTube video, in response to what I see as part of America’s growing crisis of compassion: the appalling attacks made by Christians and non-Christians alike on the women and men brave enough to speak out of their own pain to try to halt the silent juggernaut of sexual abuse in our culture. The video is called Women’s Abuse Through a Forest Lens: #Metoo in the Voice of Trees. You can see it here. It speaks of sexual abuse as a tree might speak of human assaults on forests.

I chose to get involved with this divisive issue because it’s where I live: I’ve carried the scars of childhood sexual abuse through most of my life . . . although I’ve never spoken of it publicly before–partly     because it’s intensely personal, and partly because of the kind of         vilification sure to be aimed at those who do speak out.

stripes

 

a bruised reed he will not break

How can it be that the old cliches still endure? She must have asked for it . . . it must be her fault . . . she tempted him . . . You know the words, although I hope you’ve never spoken them. How could people believe that human beings, male or female, would join their voices to the #metoo movement and invite such slander without cause?

 

No, the cause is there. It’s the scarlet elephant in the drawing room, the unspeakable secret, the sin shrouded in silence. It’s the enduring pain in the lives of men and women who’ve been sexually abused–pain as agonizing as any physical illness, and as destructive.

 

nothing hidden that will not be disclosed

One piece of bedrock wisdom offered to people healing from sexual abuse is to bring their memories into the light and speak them aloud, refusing to accept the shame abusers ladle out to       silence them. The voices flooding our media from #metoo are doing just that: coming into the light and speaking their truth. Why are the nation’s Christians not standing with them? “There is           nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be brought out into the open . . .” Even now light is shining into a place of cruel darkness. Why do we not join our light to theirs?

I’m sure that the #metoo phenomenon has its fakes and charlatans, but  “babies” and “baths” come to mind here. More damning to me are the Christian voices that admit abuse is a reality but dismiss its importance. In their eyes we who suffer from such things are Other (lesser) humans: women, children, LGBT, non-white, poor. We don’t matter.

But even if we don’t matter to many of America’s powerful, we       matter to the One Creator. We are among “the least of these” who look to our leaders with hope, and whose well-being the living Christ counts as his own.

not a sparrow falls

 

You can see the images from Through a Forest Lens below. The video is posted on YouTube.

 

 

 

 

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Book Release, culture, faith, Miranda Lamden Mysteries, reviews, writing, Yeshua

Bringing C. L. Francisco and Blair Yeatts Together

Bringing C. L. Francisco and Blair Yeatts Together

I imagine two women walking a little apart in an autumn wood where filtered sunlight hangs in the air like rainbows cast by stained glass windows. They might be sisters, although separated by many years: one has dark hair with ruddy highlights, while the elder’s hair shines silver in the shifting light. Both are tall, with the easy gait of serious walkers, loose denim skirts swirling around their legs as they stroll. Each gazes at the wood intently, reaching out to touch the trees . . . a beech here, an oak there . . . eyes shining with pleasure. The same surety of a benevolent Creator’s love undergirds both, rising up through the fallen leaves like an unfailing spring. But there they part ways.

The younger woman knows herself wounded and angry, torn from her roots, unable and unwilling to return to them. Life for her is a trackless horizon, where she must make her own way among a maze of confusing choices,

 . . . a life rent by the emptiness of years alone, of stubborn search and dead-end roads, a renegade among the certain, a voiceless stranger in the garrulous crowds.

The older woman has made her peace with that old pain, accepted the paradoxes, and learned compassion for herself and the ghosts of her past. Her eyes dwell on the infinity of light surrounding her. She falls back into shadow only rarely, and when she does, she knows the light holds her still.

Yeshua’s Cats speak with the voice of the older woman. The Miranda Lamden Mysteries live in the younger woman’s world, overlaid with the hindsight of the elder. But they are both the creation of a single heart. I hope this post may help you bring them together. I’ll also say that, with the exception of a few creative details necessary to establishing a pen name, all Blair Yeatts’ memories and thoughts shared in posted interviews are C. L. Francisco’s own, although offered from the perspective of that younger self.

Blair Yeatts’ This Madness of the Heart was my first book, apart from a mammoth PhD dissertation and an unpublished memoir. I finished the original draft almost 20 years ago, as a way of venting my hurt and anger at the dirty tricks and character assassinations in the fundamentalist takeover of a conservative protestant denomination. As often happens in revolutions, a zealous minority overwhelmed a more moderate and less vocal majority, and then ruthlessly silenced those who disagreed with them. This previously loose-knit denomination had a cherished history of settling doctrinal disagreements locally: churches had simply split, becoming the 1st, 2nd, etc., churches in a given town. Dissent was in their blood, like the freedom of the individual believer. But this ultra-conservative minority targeted the whole assembly of churches in an iron-fisted power grab.

Once the coup was accomplished, dissidents had two choices: either bow to the doctrines of the new power elite, or leave the church. The denomination of my youth was swept away in a furor of self-righteous certainty. Pastors, professors, and church leaders were driven out. Hearts and lives were broken. Doctrine was narrowed, warped, and set in stone. Callings scorned and contracts withdrawn, women clergy left to find ways to minister among people with a wider view of God’s mercy. A few powerful men now controlled the hearts and minds of the denomination’s mostly oblivious members. There was nothing I could do . . . so I wrote a book.

Unfortunately, trying to read Madness’ original draft felt much like Harry Potter opening the screaming book in the Hogwarts’ library: the anger I’d poured into it flamed from its pages. I realized this at the time, and set it aside—for almost twenty years—until I could return and treat it as a mere story. Then I wrote most of the anger out, leaving a fast-paced tale about a slimy charlatan with an honorary divinity degree in a haunted hollow in Appalachia. The story is admittedly over the top . . . vengeful ghosts don’t play feature roles in most grifters’ lives. But where evil thrives, its deadliest mass tends to hide beneath the surface . . . often masquerading as holiness.

I found myself alienated from the Christian faith during two periods in my life: first for the decade spanning college and my early twenties; second, beginning with the fundamentalist takeover and stretching across another 10-15 years. I still find myself at odds with much of the organized Church. I wrote The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat as an expression of my own faith in a Jesus of Nazareth who speaks with love and compassion, untouched by the legalism he challenged. A cat’s voice seemed appropriate for the task. The first book has now multiplied into four, with a fifth on the way.

The Miranda Lamden Mysteries have roots in those secular years, as well as in my lifelong love of mysteries, starting with Nancy Drew and most recently Charles Todd. They are not Christian mysteries. Neither are they “cozies” (emerging from a cozy mystery feels to me like struggling out of wad of cotton batting back into the realities of life). Ugly or not, if a thing is part of human experience, it’s fit to write, and read, about. Violence is part of life, and so are pain and tragedy; they belong in novels, and you will find moderate amounts in mine. But I also write about what I call “spirit” or “faith” or “redemption”—pick whichever word you like: without it the unremitting darkness of despair grinds human beings into something subhuman.

I write mysteries I’d like to read: novels of danger and intrigue, with depths of love and pain, where characters wrestle with despair and disaster, and fight their way through to the light. They surmount capricious hazards without toxic overloads of violence or sex. Spirituality and questions of meaning drive both cast and plot. I don’t strive for great literature, but for a read an intelligent mystery-lover would welcome at the end of a long day—and have difficulty putting down. I don’t guarantee happy endings, but I never end a book with despair and shattering loss of meaning . . . endings may be bittersweet, but they’re always suffused with hope.

If you’re a Blair Yeatts reader, would you like Yeshua’s Cats? If you’re a Yeshua’s Cats reader, would you like the Miranda Lamden Mysteries? Here’s my take.

Yeshua’s Cats are intended for a Christian audience, although reviewers have repeatedly assured readers that their appeal is much broader. The two most recent books, The Cats of Rekem, and Cat Born to the Purple, have both been chosen for Indie Reader’s “Best of” new book list for 2015 and 2016 respectively. But if you’re a devout atheist, or not at all spiritually inclined, I suspect you wouldn’t like them. If you’re a cat-lover you might leap all other boundaries and enjoy them anyway.

The Miranda Lamden Mysteries are full of spiritual matters of one sort and another, since Miranda is a professor of religion and an expert on paranormal phenomena . . . they’re for spiritually curious readers. But if you’re a conservative Christian who thinks preachers can do no wrong, you won’t like the first book. If you believe that you’re in possession of the only truth, and don’t care to consider anyone else’s perspective, you won’t like any of the books in the series. Like Miranda, I’ve spent much of my life in institutions of higher learning, and I’ve seen too many people convinced of the unassailable rightness of their own opinions, mistaking the echoes of their own thoughts for the voice of God. That way lies the Inquisition.

Goya, “Scene from the Inquisition”

So why did I reverse direction and decide to claim these mysteries as my own? I think the presidential election made my choice for me: the tragedy of my denomination is now replaying on the national stage, and my mysteries have become appallingly relevant. In Miranda’s words, from This Madness of the Heart:

How had we stood by and let such a man amass so much power? Why were the good people of the town not fleeing the contamination of his spirit? How could they not sense the heart of hate beneath his harangues? Any amount of violence might erupt from the bloodlust JJ was whipping up among God’s elect. Religion! Why did the search for ultimate love so often end in hate?

“What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

I realize that choosing a side in a divisive political—and religious—controversy may alienate me from some of my readers. I hope not. But for me this has become a matter of conscience, and keeping faith with myself . . . as well as with my faith.

Freedom of conscience has always been our privilege in America, but it didn’t come free: it was bought with the lives of people desperate for liberty, and its defense lies in our hands today. I pray we will have the strength and integrity to preserve the freedom our founders entrusted to us.

 

 

Christian art, culture, faith, Jesus of Nazareth, Yeshua

A Christmas Prayer for 2016

"A Christmas Prayer," by C. L. Francisco (see at bottom for explanation)
“A Christmas Prayer,” by C. L. Francisco (see at bottom for explanation)

When I want to focus my prayer over time and through all my senses I create prayer as art–in my intent, in my  praying, and in my prayer’s final emergence into the world. So here is the embodiment of the prayers I’ve been praying during an extended retreat for the last week or so, as I’ve grieved and prayed for the healing of the inhumanity I see steadily emerging in the patterns of our nation’s new administration. I believe that the reality that is taking shape there honors neither America’s historic democracy nor the Christian faith.

“A Christmas Prayer” prays that the incomprehensible divine love we celebrate at the Christmas season will fill all our hearts, from the smallest child to the nation’s leaders, and open our eyes to the wideness of God’s mercy, which encompasses the whole of Creation.

I, too, feel the times growing harder; the American dream seems to be slipping through our fingers. But I don’t understand how so many of America’s Christians could have gotten so muddled in their distress. How could we forget that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”?

We must hold to these and other words that have shaped our faith:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.”

“Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”!

“What does the Lord require of you but to do do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Jesus did not model the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” by narrowing the definition of “neighbor” to those whose race, language, skin color, birth country, and beliefs were identical to his own.

I grieve for us as a nation.

“The Scapegoat,” by Wm Holman Hunt
“The Scapegoat,” by Wm Holman Hunt

We have stumbled and fallen at the 3rd temptation where Yeshua stood firm: we have grasped for temporal power. These words are from Yeshua’s Cat describing his final temptation in the wilderness:

There was silence for a time. Then ben Adamah’s eyes cleared, he saw me watching, and he smiled. Now he was looking at a definite place, somewhere to the right of where I stood (my fur was bristling, and I was ready to spring away at any moment. Did I see something moving there in the moonless dark?).

“Oh, you evil fool,” the son of Earth laughed, “you have misjudged your game tonight! I have seen too many good men corrupted by even a little of that power to fall into its snare. The power I seek is the power to heal body and soul, the power of one who walks unnoticed among many, seeking the good of all: the power that binds creation together, not a power that consumes it. Burning through my heart is a power that rejects you and all you offer. I will have none of your thrones, your palaces, or your rich robes. No man, woman, or child will ever grovel before me in fear! Get out of my sight, corrupter of innocence. You have no place here.”

The night grew quiet then, the tension vanishing on a slight breeze. Whatever had been happening was finished.

“Come, curl up beside me, little mother,” ben Adamah said softly. “My vigil is over for tonight. It’s time to sleep.”

2_grace2

 

For those of you with a curious turn of mind, I’ll explain a bit of what’s going on in this digital mosaic. The overall pattern is based on the south rose window at Notre Dame of Paris. Literally thousands of tiny pieces of layers were combined to complete the whole.

  • At the very center is a spiral galaxy from the Hubble series, with a star superimposed, also from Hubble, and a close up of Mary and the baby Jesus from William Holman Hunt’s “The Triumph of the Innocents.”
  • Around the central image is a circle of 12 identical panels of the “Tree of Jesse” from a Chartres Cathedral window. The, tree, or root, of Jesse–Jesus’ human lineage (from the prophet Isaiah)–is often called the Tree of Life.
  • The round rose-window shapes in the next ring are 24 identical images of grape vines from another Notre Dame rose window, pieced together into rings.
  • The next circle out from the center is composed of elders from traditions all over the world, including Pope Francis, an Orthodox bishop, Rev. Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and many others from cultures great and small.
  • Behind each elder’s head is a plain aquamarine stained glass circle.
  • Above these circles are hands of different colors, each reaching out to help others and to the One in prayer.
  • Beyond the ring of hands are round stained glass windows framing the faces of ordinary people from ethnic groups around the world.
  • Interspersed between these portrait circles are small stained glass windows from Notre Dame de la Croix.
  • Around the outer edge of the circle are flowers from blossoming trees holding the faces of the world’s children, overlain with translucent spring beech leaves.
  • From behind each blossom the Bethlehem star shines out.
  • Throughout the whole circle the branches of the tree of life weave in and out of the pattern.
  • And overall, a rainbow of stained-glass light colors all the shapes beneath it, just as the One’s love embraces all Creation.

I wish you all a blessed Thanksgiving and Christmas, filled with gratitude for our many blessings, and with prayers for our leaders’ wisdom.

 

 

 

 

ancient roman empire, Apostle Paul, biblical Israel, Decapolis, Early Church, Jesus of Nazareth, Yeshua

Paul and the Damascus Wall

PageOpener4a

Doing the research for The Cats of Rekem was a long and fascinating process. Perhaps the most surprising part of it was discovering how little we really know about those first days after Paul’s vision on the Damascus road. Here are the only biblical verses (from The New English translation) that describe those days:

Acts 9:19-25–[immediately after his conversion] “He spent some time with the disciples in Damascus. Soon he was proclaiming Jesus publicly in the synagogues. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the Son of God.’  All who heard were astounded. ‘Is not this the man,’ they said, ‘who was in Jerusalem trying to destroy those who invoke this name? Did he not come here for the sole purpose of arresting them and taking them to the chief priests?’ But Saul grew more and more forceful and silenced the Jews of Damascus with his cogent proofs that Jesus was the Messiah. As the days mounted up, the Jews hatched a plot against his life; but their plans became known to Saul. They kept close watch on the city gates day and night so that they might murder him; but his converts took him one night and let him down by the wall, lowering him in a basket.”

2 Corinthians 11:32-33–“When I was in Damascus, the commissioner of King Aretas kept the city under observation so as to have me arrested; and I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and so escaped his clutches.”

Galatians 1:16-20–“When that happened [his conversion], without consulting any human being, without going up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before me, I went off at once to Arabia, and afterwards returned to Damascus. Three years later I did go up to Jerusalem to get to know Cephas. I stayed with him for a fortnight, without seeing any other of the apostles, except James, the Lord’s brother. What I write is plain truth; before God I am not lying.”

In the Acts account, in the paragraph following the one above describing Paul’s escape from Damascus, Luke speaks of Paul’s trip to Jerusalem, where he met all the disciples. In light of Paul’s own words in his letter to the Galatians above, I believe Luke must have been describing a later trip to Jerusalem. Paul states clearly that he went immediately to Arabia from Damascus. The three passages above, then, are our only sources for Paul’s departure from Damascus.

2006BC5336

So what do we know about Paul’s night at the wall?  Let’s look first at the wall itself.

The biblical text in Galatians uses the word θυρίς, thuris, which means a small opening or window. The text in Acts merely says Paul was lowered through the wall; no opening is specified. So, perhaps the word need not be translated “window.”

I had some difficulty imagining a window in the middle of a Decapolis city wall, so I started researching 1st C CE city walls in Roman Syria, specifically at Damascus. I discovered that not much more than a few foundation stones are visible in Damascus, underneath later walls dating mostly to the Middle Ages. But I did discover that Damascus was transformed by its Seleucid (Greek) conquerors somewhere around the 3rd C BCE. The city was then rebuilt along N/S and E/W axes, in much the same pattern that remains today. The city walls were rebuilt as well. When the Romans took over Damascus in the mid-1st C BCE, they set to work rebuilding much of the city again, adding their typical monumental touches. They also strengthened the walls and extended them outward to include an area larger than the earlier Greek walls. The Roman walls stood approximately where the walls stand today.

In the pictures below you can see a reconstruction of the east gate in the Roman wall surrounding the Decapolis city of Hippos, and a model of the Decapolis city of Scythopolis (Bet She’an), with the city wall around it. Notice in both that the only openings/windows are in the actual gate towers, which are guard quarters. The walls themselves are high and smooth, without openings, although the spaces in the crenelations might be called “openings.”

Hippos East Gate
Hippos East Gate
Model of Scythopolis
Model of Scythopolis

But what exactly did Roman walls look like? How were they constructed? I discovered that there is an amazing amount of research dedicated to the study of Roman walls. As a result we know quite a lot about their internal structure and appearance. By the time of the Roman building projects in Damascus (which were approaching their peak when Paul visited there), Roman walls were often being constructed with a rubble core faced with concrete and tiles. The huge quarried stones of earlier walls were being used only for the foundations.

Structure of a Roman Wall/Arch
Structure of a Roman Wall/Arch

Hadrian’s Wall is a good example of this style of wall, and has survived well enough to be studied thoroughly. The pictures below are artist’s reconstructions of Hadrian’s Wall.

This rubble-core style of wall-building is described in The Cats of Rekem. Such walls would lend themselves even less easily than ashlar walls to openings/windows, even if windows were considered desirable in defensive walls. Nowhere did I find Roman walls like the early ones pictured in childhood Bible studies, where city walls were made up of the walls of houses haphazardly connected together. So, how could there be an “opening” in the Damascus wall, “through” which Paul might be lowered in a basket? I decided that a collapsed rubble wall might serve the purpose: perhaps poorly made, weakened by earthquake, attack, or collapse of subterranean chamber–any of those would do. The result would be a breach in the wall that might be described as an opening. There you have the basis of Paul’s adventure as I described it in The Cats of Rekem.

Bab Kisan, traditional site of Paul's escape
Bab Kisan, traditional site of Paul’s escape, mainly medieval stonework

I also moved Paul’s escape route to a different part of the wall from the one that Church tradition identifies,  in the photo above. I agree with Ross Burns, in his excellent book, Damascus: A History, that a location right over a Roman gate–and in the Jewish quarter, was an unlikely place for a successful escape. You can see that the traditional gate above, Bab Kisan, is #3 on the map of Old Damascus as it is known today (above). That same gate is on the map of Roman Damascus (also above), and located on the south side, near the eastern corner: at the major market thoroughfare and adjoining the Jewish quarter. Paul’s escape in The Cats of Rekem is marked by the words “broken wall,” just north of the gate under construction on the eastern wall.

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culture, Early Church, faith, Jesus of Nazareth

The Acts of John, a Gnostic gospel

 

“Grace dances . . . dance, all of you!”
—The Acts of John

Heresy vs orthodoxy is the stuff that breeds wars, and Church history is full of it. Without getting into a discussion of Church councils and the creation of the Christian canon, I’d like to look at a 2nd C gnostic gospel that was pronounced heretical—and see what it might say to us today.

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St Ignatius of Antioch, Enemy of Docetism
St Ignatius of Antioch, Enemy of Docetism

The Acts of John was condemned by Church fathers as docetic (docetism is the belief that Jesus’ humanity and physical body were an illusion). To modern eyes John can be a peculiar book, full of bizarre notions and unappealing ideas—particularly its contention that the spirit of Christ abandoned the man Jesus to suffer on the cross alone, while the divine essence stood apart, untouched by pain.

But if you can set that notion aside, The Acts of John offers a number of intriguing thoughts. Perhaps most familiar is a lovely passage known as “The Circle Dance of the Cross,” in which, the night before his death, Jesus invites all his disciples to form a circle and dance around him. Those of you who have read Yeshua’s Cat may recognize the last four lines of the quote below as part of Yeshua’s conversation with his mother before he left Nazareth for the last time.

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Here is an edited version of the original text:

[Jesus] stood in the circle’s center and said, “Answer ‘Amen’ to everything I say.” Then he began to sing a hymn, saying:
“Glory be to you, Father.”
And we, moving around him in a ring, answered him: “Amen.”
“We praise you, O Father; we give thanks to you, O Light where darkness cannot dwell.”
“Amen.”
“I would be saved, and I would save.”
“Amen.”
“I would be freed, and I would free.”
“Amen.”
“I would be wounded, and I would wound.”
“Amen.”
“I would be born, and I would give birth.”
“Amen.”
“I would eat, and I would be eaten.”
“Amen.”
“I would hear, and I would be heard.”
“Amen.”
“I would be thought of, being wholly thought.”
“Amen.”
“I would be washed, and I would wash.”
“Amen.”
“Grace dances. I would pipe; dance, all of you.”
“Amen.”
“I would mourn: lament, all of you.”
“Amen . . .”
“The Whole on high takes part in our dancing.”
“Amen.”
“Whoever does not dance cannot understand what is coming to pass.”
“Amen.”
“I would flee, and I would stay.”
“Amen.”
“I would adorn, and I would be adorned.”
“Amen.”
“I would be united, and I would unite.”
“Amen . . .”
“A lamp am I to you who behold me.”
“Amen.”
“A mirror am I to you who perceive me.”
“Amen.”
“A door am I to you who knock at me.”
“Amen.”
“A way am I to you a wanderer . . . “

Picasso, "Dance of Youth"
Picasso, “Dance of Youth”

Christian mystics down through the centuries have used the metaphor of dance to describe the human relationship to God, and I found John’s Circle Dance delightful.

Well, I mused, if The Acts of John can include the Circle Dance, what else might I find? So I examined the book more closely. Another idea present throughout the book is that Jesus appeared in many different guises while he walked the earth. I must admit that John’s list allows for a few more possibilities than the canonical gospels: a child, a young handsome man, a youth just bearding, a middle-aged balding man, a small ugly man, a huge heavenly man, a being of whiteness and light, a man with a soft yielding body, a man whose body was hard as stone, a body firm to the touch, and a body with no physical solidity at all. John describes the significance of these guises with the words, “. . . his great grace, his unity that had many faces . . . “

Those words reminded me of recent critics in the search for the historical Jesus who point out that people of every age have tried to mold Jesus into their own ideal of who he should be—thus hopelessly muddying the waters for anyone trying to discern the true historical person.

JesusImages

But here’s my thought: what if Jesus’ message right from the beginning was intended to be a message for all ages and all people? What if his message always had access points that could lead people along diverse paths to the One through him? What if he included embryonic possibilities in his teaching that could support every positive interpretation ever put on his original message? Everything from human rights, the light within, and justice—to caring for the environment and liberation theology? What if most Christian heresies, while diverging from the mainstream, have a unique glimmer of this truth?

Unfortunately, we as humans too often seize on glimmers of truth as if they were the final and complete word of God rather than single facets. Just so the Church has long been at fault for trying to narrow Jesus’ message to fit their limited understanding, enclosing it within a box made to their order. In the hands of the Church, too often the multifaceted diamond of Jesus’ message has been transformed into a stony concretion in crumbling stone—frozen and trapped beneath masses of accumulated tradition.

“His unity that had many faces . . .” is one insight from The Acts of John that we might wish to heed. What if one of Jesus’ primary goals—long obscured by human ignorance—was to bring healing to the shattered images of the One, fragmented for so long among human cultures? What if he offered freedom, and the brilliant unity of God’s countenance, to all people—and we have warped them instead into shadow and condemnation?

Just a thought.

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Photo from thefreedomexperiment.com

 

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ancient roman empire, biblical Israel, culture, Early Church, faith, Jesus of Nazareth, Yeshua

Yeshua and the Mystery Religions

Anyone who has studied the history of religions is aware of the shift in human consciousness that began sometime in the last millennium BCE and lasted into the early centuries of the Common Era. During those years human religious practice moved dramatically away from old communal forms and took on more personal expression. Individual human beings began to approach their gods in increasingly distinctive ways, and more and more spiritual teachers emphasized the value of individual human lives. Even C. G. Jung tried to explain the phenomenon in his Psychology and Religion West and East.

Ancient Sumerian gods
Ancient Sumerian gods

 

buddha-sm
Buddha
Zarathustra
Zarathustra

In India the sage Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, offered seekers a Middle Way to enlightenment between the extremes of asceticism and worldly sensuality. In Persia Zarathustra introduced the idea of the freedom of individual human beings and the importance of their choosing to labor with the God of Light, Ahura Mazda, against the forces of darkness and ignorance.

 

 

Prophet Hosea
Prophet Hosea

In Israel the prophets emerged, offering ethical virtues such as compassion and mercy as alternatives to the old sacrificial system; Hillel the Elder followed in the 1st C BCE with his Golden Rule, and his famous statement that “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world, and whosoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

 

Jesus of Nazareth, born around 4 BCE, brought a unique gospel of love and life to humankind, known for two millennia as Christianity.

Early catacomb images of Jesus performing miracles
Early catacomb images of Jesus performing miracles

All around Jesus, throughout the ever-spreading Roman Empire, Mystery Religions were attracting followers by the tens of thousands. In each of these Mysteries, individual men and women found hope of eternal life through initiation into secret knowledge unavailable to those outside their communities. Dionysian, Eleusinian, Cybeline, Isaic, Mithraic, and Orphic mysteries were but some of them. In many instances the secret knowledge was imparted through the initiate’s participatory experience in the death and rebirth of the god or goddess.

Serapis-Osiris,Persephone and Hades, Mithras, Dionysus
Serapis-Osiris,Persephone and Hades, Mithras, Dionysus

In the process of writing The Cats of Rekem, the third volume in the Yeshua’s Cats series, I wandered into the jungle of Greco-Roman Mystery Religions. I won’t try to offer an explanation of why they exploded into the ancient world, but they were spreading like wildfire across the Mediterranean basin in the years before and after Yeshua’s life. Early Christians were well acquainted with these religions, and in many cases they came to the Church from them.

Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries
Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries

Numbers of people have written countless volumes of material about the relationship between early Christianity and Mystery Religions, some scholarly and accurate, many biased and inflammatory. As a writer of historical fiction whose characters are rooted in the beliefs of their day, I came up against the question of Mystery Religions in a very personal way. In particular, I found myself needing to understand exactly how Yeshua’s original message differed from the message of the Mysteries. And I didn‘t want to expound the same old Christian apologetics and bland assurances that no overlap ever existed. It obviously did.

Christ as Sol Invictus, mosaic from 3rd C Vatican grottoes
Christ as Sol Invictus (unconquered sun), mosaic from 3rd C Vatican grottoes

So I dusted off my books on Greco-Roman culture and began to refresh my memory. I took notes, and made charts. I even drew up a spreadsheet. I concluded that there were many, many apparent similarities between the practices of the early Church and the Mystery Religions; in fact, there were far more similarities than differences—baptism, equality of men and women, depictions of mother and child, separation of the community from the wider society, hope of immortality through the death and resurrection of a god or founder, ritual commemoration of that same founder’s death and resurrection. The list goes on and on.

But this left me with two troublesome questions. First, did these obvious similarities in the early Church really reflect Yeshua’s message? And second, allowing for the possibility that they might not, how did Yeshua’s message itself differ from the Mysteries? I even went so far as to wonder what he might have said to one of the Mystery devotees that surely crossed his path.

"Christ and the Adulteress," Cranach the Elder
“Christ and the Adulteress,” Cranach the Elder

In the end I isolated several radically new ideas in Jesus’ message that found no parallels in the other religions of his day. In some cases these ideas didn’t survive very long in the young Church. Here they are, as I see them:

  • He preached a loving God who sought reconciliation with humanity—not justice, or retribution, or punishment
  • He brought this God into direct relationship with human beings, without priests or organized religions between them and the Deity who loved them
  • He offered his listeners a simple choice: accept God’s love and embrace the freedom growing out of that love, or turn their backs and lose themselves in their own darkness
  • He preached a peaceful, non-violent approach to life
  • He didn’t call for a system of initiates vs outsiders: the thrust of his message was always of mysteries revealed, hardened hearts opening to understanding, and truths simple enough for a child to grasp
  • Perhaps in contrast to the Mysteries, (which were celebrated in darkness) he characterized his message as one of light, revealed in the light of day for all to see
  • Rather than the emotional frenzy common to the Mysteries, where initiates agonized and suffered, imagining themselves suffering with their dying and rising god, he offered his followers a death accomplished, and new life freely given: where such participatory agonies have entered the Church, I suspect they may have come by way of the Mystery Religions, not Yeshua’s words

The first two hundred years of the Church were violent and chaotic, and the records are conflicting. Many stories lie outside the scope of the Bible. I believe that there’s room to question traditional understandings of the Church’s message–and to question the way the Church has interpreted the words of Christ.

But don’t take my word for it: look for yourself! If there’s a mystery, it’s hiding in plain sight.

 

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culture, Early Church, faith, Jesus of Nazareth, Yeshua

Tour de Fat and a Gospel of Love

 

Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan
Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan

“Follow your folly!” That’s the traditional slogan of Tour de Fat, New Belgium Brewing Company’s annual Labor Day weekend bike extravaganza in Fort Collins (I’m guessing  the name is borrowed from their Fat Tire Golden Ale). For those of you who don’t follow such things, Tour de Fat is billed as a Halloween-like costume extravaganza–on  bicycles–with beer, bands and fun, all hosted by New Belgium Brewing Company.

Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan
Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan

Its overall purpose, apart from fun, is to encourage muscle-powered (as opposed to gas-powered) transport. All proceeds go to ecological and sustainability non-profits.

Not being a CSU student, or a cyclist, or actually living in Fort Collins for several years, I didn’t pay much attention to Tour de Fat. But for the last couple of years I’ve been living near the city park where much of the craziness takes place.  I suspect that its huge local success is partly due to CSU and the fact that Tour de Fat falls early enough in the academic year not to be overshadowed by academic pressures, but I think half of Fort Collins must turn out as well.

Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan
Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan
Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan
Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything from skateboards to unicycles and tall bikes crowd the streets, ridden by a truly bizarre assortment of contestants (yes, there are contests, too). My personal favorites in last year’s bicycle parade were the bucket-helmed bike jouster and the bearded senior on a yellow glider bike. But as soon as I say that, I remember the rolling occasional table with human lamp and the infinite variety of cross-dressing ballerinas and fairies. Everyone wears a smile and a good time is had by all.

Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan
Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan
Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan
Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan

 

 

 

 

 

Except perhaps for some of my more conservative Christian neighbors. I’m not sure exactly what sets them off about the Tour de Fat. Maybe it’s the beer, or the irreverent humor, or the amount of bare skin, or even the fun–but when I commented on the festival atmosphere, I felt like one of those cartoon characters bent backwards by the gale force of someone’s anger. I distinctly heard the words “pagan,” “heathen,” “godless,” “perverts,” and “shameless,” along with a predictable flow of tedious filler. I wriggled away as quickly as possible, making soothing noises as I went. They weren’t inviting dialogue.

Our encounter set me wondering, and not for the first time: How is it that Christianity  so often takes on the sour and condemnatory face of believers like these? Where did it begin? It was certainly with us by the time of the Puritans. And let’s not forget the Inquisition. Or the Albigensian Crusades. Or even the early Church Councils that declared minority beliefs to be heresy. How did intolerance overwhelm the good news of God’s love for all people?

I thank God for Pope Francis whenever I think of him, although I’m not Catholic. His all-embracing love for humanity is a stream of living water in a thirsty land, even if I don’t agree with everything he says. Hate has taken root in too many of our churches:  hate of the Other, of those    unlike ourselves. This is the same hate that drove Nazi Germany, Bosnian and Cambodian genocide, and still drives the appalling atrocities of ISIS. I’m not sure that there is much qualitative difference between one person’s hate and another’s: there is degree, and opportunity, and restraint or incitement, but the root emotion is the same. None of us is altogether free of it.

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Photo, Dawn Madura, The Coloradoan

A mirror might be a useful devotional tool as we consider Jesus’ warning that a hate-driven insult is as cruel as murder. There may be a difference in degree, but not in essence.

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