Theology Of Love 24

 So, how do we come to love unconditionally?  That is not going to be easy.  For anyone.  To everything there is a limit, sung in Portuguese by the late great Cesaría Evora.  And everyone has their limit.   I   have my limit.  We all have our limit.   Generally if a situation becomes abusive and unsafe for me that is when I am going to pull the plug.  Once I have overstayed long enough to get  seriously hurt, poisoned or damaged by another being then for a while at least I am no longer going to be very useful in this world. But, Ah! you might say, what about forgiveness!  Who is this great and mighty Christian, writing such noble and glowing words from the Gospels on one page, then on the next page completely contradicting and overturning the most elemental teachings of  Jesus, and just to suit his caprice of the moment?  But, yes, Gentle Reader, I am being challenged these days to practice what I preach.  I am being challenged and taught to forgive, not simply to just let it go so I can feel better about myself, but to truly, madly, deeply and profoundly forgive from the very depths of my dark little heart anyone and everyone who has ever harmed, traumatized or damaged me or inalterably changed for the worse the course of my life.  I have, in recent days, had two opportunities of practicing forgiveness.  Both occurred with individuals who had previously indecently assaulted me.

One of them was my neighbour for the first several years I had lived in this building where I still reside.  In fact, like me, he was one of the first tenants when this building opened in 2002.  I will not go into details about what occurred, but some of his inappropriate behaviour became such that I came to feel very nervous and unsafe around him, and certainly having to live across the hall from him.  It was very difficult  communicating to management about any of this, since the acting manager then was a very homophobic Christian fundamentalist. He is one of two male tenants who have been inappropriate towards me.  The other was downright traumatizing to me.  He is also long-gone from Candela Place.

My former neighbour had moved into a sister building in the same neighbourhood, and I felt no small relief that he was gone, with the possible exception that the two successive tenants in the same unit have also been pretty difficult, but at least they have kept their hands to themselves.   Since my former neighbour moved to the other building, I do see him from time to time on the sidewalk in the area.  never acknowledging me, not even looking my way.  For years I carried resentment towards him, thinking of him as a useless waste of DNA, forgetting for five minutes or so that the poor man was living with a mental illness.  For ten years or more, we would pass each other on the sidewalk, like strangers.  Then, just two or three days ago, I saw him near my building as I was on my way home.  I looked up at him, smiled and said hi.  His face lit up as he shyly responded.  No dramatics, no loving embrace, not even a warm handshake, but just enough eye contact to assure him and reassure him that it was okay, that we are now okay with each other, that all shall be well, and he walked away looking lighter, like one relieved of a dreadful shadow.

It happened again yesterday, on the bus.  I was greeted by a young man who used to be my client.  He was also in love with me.  And really tried to use his hands to express his feelings.  On top of my body.  This was very distressing to me, and I needed a lot of support from colleagues at work to get through this without becoming traumatized.  After we stopped working together, I tended to get a bit uncomfortable the rare time I saw him in public, and found myself usually shrinking back from him.  Yesterday on the bus, I let that all go, and we rode the bus together chatting randomly like brothers.  

Neither of these men can hurt me any longer.  Both these men have been very hurt by life.  I feel that by forgiving them both, I have lessened their pain and helped open to them something new and possibly something that could be very beautiful, even if we never see each other again.

Theology Of Love 23

 Probably, like me, some of you have seen those lame Dovato ads.  You know the ones I mean.  They feature often good looking, usually younger men with these almost drooling smiles while making cow eyes and they are all saying, "I'm looking forward."  Especially that dewy eyed, Latino looking guy with the dark stubble.  Oh, those melting brown Latin puppy eyes!  He looks so beautiful, so alluring, so soft, gentle and kind.  So heartrendingly vulnerable. And to think that most of us, when we look that way, it usually means one thing and one thing only.  Even if  you're a gay woman or a straight man, or an asexual, it would be hard to resist that allure, if only to give him a hug and a cuddle.   We are expecting to get laid.  We are really wanting to get laid. We are about to get laid.    And for many that is what love is.  Getting laid.  Having sex.  Getting yours, as we used to say in the seventies.  It's also the theme chant for queer liberation: Love is love.  And for love to be love, that means it has to be someone who gets our hormones pumping, with the possibility or inevitability of getting lucky.  And then what?! Well, it usually means that all others are not welcome, unless you have the right look, in which case, take a number and stand in line.  And to think that Dovato is a treatment for treating HIV and AIDS, and if you haven't got that formerly lethal virus from injecting drugs or from a blood transfusion, then you likely got it from whomever you happened to be carelessly shagging.   So, take your Dovato, get back out into the race and hold your legs high!

"Tonight, you're mine completely,

You give your love so sweetly

Tonight the light of love is in your eyes.

But will you love me tomorrow."

Ah, but it doesn't last.  It never does, even if you both happen to be happily and beautifully and eternally married.  To each other, that is.   It looks like love.  It feels like love.  But this is no Mother Teresa or St. Francis of Assis.  This is just simple human desire and human need, making us momentarily telegenic enough to get into someone else's trousers or knickers or bedsheets, or wherever.  I suppose we could say that is the way nature designed us, to get ourselves all lovely and irresistible and compelling to the next lucky contestant on the Price Is Right (oops, wrong TV show!)...Rather the next willing partner that will pass on our genes, immortalizing us nine months later in a lovely bundle of sprawling shit machine progeny.  Ah, evolutionary biology.  Don't leave home without it.

But evolutionary biology cannot explain homosexuality.  I cannot think of any two men or any two women that have made love to each other for the purpose of getting pregnant.  But two men or two women can get married, be married and stay married just like any man or woman.  And they can enjoy sex every bit as much and maybe even more.

So, the sweet eyed little studly from the Dovato ad gets himself lucky, scores a night in the sack or at least five minutes with some reasonably presentable stranger in the toilet stall of a men's restroom, and before you know it, once they have had their orgasms, wiped themselves clean, zipped up their designer jeans and each gone their own separate lonely ways, the lovely soft eyes are going to resume their habitual dull, soulless and frowning aspect, and he just looks again like some ordinary uninteresting Joe completely unable to put down his smartphone, likely getting back on grinder checking the menu for dessert.  Is that what love is?  No, tell me, Gentle Reader, is that what love really is?

There has to be another way, a better way.  Some way of harnessing all that kind gentle love, all that lovely, sexy erotic energy, all that beautiful and alluring vulnerability, not for personal self-gratification, but for the collective, the common good.  I think that the bonobo apes have it maybe half right.  Those little monkeys (actually they´re almost as big as we are!) shag each other mercilessly.  Which is to say, not with whips, handcuffs, chains or leather, but with their own hairy little bodies.  They resolve all their conflicts with sex.  Male on female, female on female, male on male.  And they get along splendidly, almost none of the tension or violence or bloodlust of their chimp relatives.

I think that for humans there is a middle way.  Something more intimate and tender than a detached sense of charity because it is the right thing to do. But also an approach that is balanced, respectful and safe, that does not play favourites.  I am thinking here of unconditional love.  Who then is my neighbour? Someone asked Jesus, who replied with the tale of the Good Samaritan, who took a man victimized by a violent mugging, and took care of him until he recovered.

Theology Of Love 22

 Today, I saw what happens when love collides with fear.  Now, none of us can really come to love perfectly, and I don't even think unconditionally, though sometimes we might come very and strangely close to loving unconditionally. I am coming to experience this more these days.  It is intoxicating, refreshing...and frightening! I am referring to a young man, South Asian, perhaps, walking his dog, a black labrador pup.  They had just come out of the apartment building, and the dog badly wanted to make friends with me.  This dog really wanted to make friends with me.  His owner was walking just ahead of me, and the dog kept turning around, wagging his tail quite madly, looking at me with classic puppy eyes, but even more, he kept trying to come over to me so that the poor guy had to drag him on his leash.  

While I like dogs okay, I am not barmy about them.  I have a slight preference for cats.  Yeah, I guess you might have guessed this, Gentle Reader.  I am, if not exactly a cat person,... well, I really cannot understand why there are so many cat haters out there anyway.  They are lovely and beautiful animals.  Way more beautiful and graceful than dogs, though I think greyhounds and huskies to also be rather beautiful as far as dogs go.  But here I digress.

As we got near the stoplight, I thought I would say something to the dog's human, so I said, "I don't think you're going to get very far with your dog until you let me pet him."  I didn't particularly want to pet the dog, but he seemed nice, seemed to really want to make contact, and I thought that if I could stop to pet him a bit, he would calm down and his owner would have an easier time walking him after.  All likely very true.  But I didn't bargain for this guy's absolutely hostile and paranoid reaction.  He simply ran against the light, dragging the dog with him in order to get away from me.  Not speaking one single word, civil or otherwise.  A frightened, hostile little snob.  He does not deserve such a loving dog for a pet.  

I am sure he loves his little doggy.  Likely in a way that is very insecure and very possessive.  He is one of those many lonely neurotics that fill our urban neighbourhoods.  Being too timid and too uppity to actually connect meaningfully with other human beings, he has to get himself a little puppy dog, because he can control the dog and be sure to be loved unconditionally by a being who will not challenge or test him.  He doesn't want a friend, he wants a love slave.  That is so sad.

It is also to me a real picture of how we distort and misunderstand love.  Some of us are just so frightened, timid and selfish little cowards that we will deny ourselves the rich and rewarding opportunity of real friendship and meaningful connection with other human beings, because we don't want to be hurt and we want to have everything our own way.  So we get an animal instead.  This is abuse, towards a dumb and helpless animal.  He doesn't have a pet.  He has a hostage.

Am I insulted or offended with this person?  Not exactly. He simply didn't seem to me like an interesting person, though I would still be open to talking to him, not as an excuse to pet his dog, but to simply reach out to a fellow human being.  Was I feeling particularly lonely?  Not in the least.  I was on my way to visit a close friend, with whom I had an awesome walk in the woods and coffee visit afterward, then later online with two really close friends who live in Latin America (Colombia and Costa Ricas, respectively).  I do not need more friends, and I am not looking for more friends.  I already have plenty.  But because I myself am a friend, I am always open to and reaching out to others, not to fill my own need but to do what I can to help reach out to others in their isolation.

I hope that shy, frightened and selfish young man does have at least someone in his life  he can connect with.  But I rather doubt it.  I also hope that my fumbling attempt to reach out to him will eventually bear fruit in his life as he grows up a bit and finds out that in order to emerge out of his isolation he has to stop taking life and other people for granted.  When you are young that is particularly difficult, and only after a few decades of the big asskicking that God in his mercy does not spare any of us, we can trust that this poor shrunken little soul will eventually get over himself.

Theology Of Love 21

 Back love is really desiring someone's highest good.  hen I was connected with Youth With A Mission, it was commonly understood that.  Yes, a lofty statement, that, and somewhat abstract.  Of course, it can be anyone's guess just what really is someone else's highest good.   I suppose that was also meant to be understood as meaning whatever could help that person come close to God, or live their lives as fulfilled Christians.  But, I don't know. During my time in YWAM I had my bellyful of Christian leaders purporting to understand just exactly was my higher good, and their noble intentions of moving heaven and earth to see that I got it.  

Except...

None of them really knew squat.  They were all young, mostly Americans or American influenced (and who isn't?), impatient, judgmental, and quite immature. they were also fundamentalists, but fundamentalists so they weren't really at all well-equi8pped to deal with the splinter in someone else's eye, given the size of the two by fours that were jutting out of their own sockets.  

Now let''s check and compare with the famous Love Chapter by none other thn St. Paul the Apostle, 1 Corinthians 13:

13 If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Yes, Gentle Reader, they do seem to be talking about two different things here...

Theology Of Love, 20

 I'm thinking right now of the two conflicting faces of love:  the gentle and the severe.  They are both love, both proceed from the same source of love eternal and immortal.   Here is an illustration.  Wen I lived in Christian community some thirty years ago, I was involved in a conversation about angels with two of our members.  One, a woman, very feminine and very maternal, said that for her angels were gentle and nurturing and always had their arms around us.  The other, a man (those two were both classic exhibits from the museum of gender stereotypes), super and toxically masculine, insisted that angels were like big body building armed guards on steroids standing around us with their big clubs and ready to protect us from those snivelling weak little devils.  Well, that isn't exactly what he said, but might as well be.  Neither appeared interested in listening to each other, neither did they warm much to my idea that perhaps the angels could .  incarnate the characteristics of both.  They each seemed to find ridiculous my suggestion. 

But they are, still, two very distinct and very real and valid faces of love.  We think of Jesus with the little children, very tender and welcoming.  then, with the weak, the wounded, the sick and the frightened, so nurturing, so kind and so present to help and heal and encourage and inspire.  his tone is somewhat different when his disciples are being particularly thick, stubborn or slow.  To Peter when he tries to reprimand our Lord for sayi8ng that he will be going to his death, he says, "Get away from me, Satan".  even to the Syrophoenician woman begging him to free her daughter from a tormenting demon, he at first tells her to get lost, and that he is not going to give what is sacred to the dogs.  evidently, Jesus was not particularly barmy about dogs.  Only when he starts to clue in that he is called to serve all, and not only the lost sheep of the house of Israel, does he clue in, and grant her her request.  Then come the Pharisees and, hoo boy!  No wonder they didn't like him.  But I will let the text here speak for itself:

Seven Woes on the Teachers of the Law and the Pharisees

13 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. [14] [b]

15 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

16 “Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath.’ 17 You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred? 18 You also say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath.’ 19 You blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred? 20 Therefore, anyone who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. 21 And anyone who swears by the temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. 22 And anyone who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the one who sits on it.

23 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

29 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30 And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!

33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? 34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation.

37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. 38 Look, your house is left to you desolate. 39 For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’[c]”

Theology Of love 19

 The Anglican archbishop here in Vancouver hates this blog, as does one of the priests I used to be in communication with.  When this priest and I were on speaking terms (and we still would be on speaking terms if she would have the courtesy to answer my last two or three emails), one day over coffee she informed me that Her Nibs was not amused with my random scribblings.  in my nasty little blogposts.   They wanted to know why there appeared to be such a huge contrast between the Aaron they thought they knew in  person (nice, polite and kind), and the rantings and ravings of this precious and pernicious blog.  Or, why couldn't my blog be more like Jesus?  I should add here that the Anglican version of Jesus is exactly that, a nice, kind polite man, rather like an English upper middle class gentleman farmer who likes to spend his Sundays shooting pheasants and his Saturdays fox-hunting, and who wouldn't dream of offending or ruining your day by telling you the truth about anything.  The priest didn't reply when I asked her if that was the same Jesus who yelled, "Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!"

Oh yes, there are many faces to love: tender, meek, kind, humble, and compassionate.  but then compassion can be set on fire and become a blazing fireball of divine indignation and the vindication of justice, the defense of the helpless and vulnerable:  speaking truth unto power and openly challenging and defying systems of injustice and oppression  Beginning of course, in Mother Church, which more often than not is the first bone yard full of festering hypocrisy that needs to be dealt with and cleaned out.

By the way, I also said to the same priest, in a kind and gentle voice, with a smile on my face, that by the way, she can tell Her Nibs the Archbishop that I am going to write whatever the fuck I want in this blog, or anywhere else.  Oh, the puss on her when I said that!  Is there any wonder that the Anglican Church (at least the paid Christians Division) seems to hate me so much.

I just had a brief chat downstairs with another tenant in my building.  He is a little bit older than me and we are both original tenants here, which is to say that we have lived here since Candela Place opened more than eighteen years ago.  He was not wearing a mask, and we both were waiting for the elevator.  I asked him if he could put on a mask please,  and he cited some excuse, possibly a valid one, that he had a respiratory issue about wearing masks.  So, I replied that he wouldn't mind then going up in the elevator alone, and I'll wait for the next one.  He retorted that so far no one in this building "has it".  I replied, Not yet anyway, and this is how we help prevent the virus from getting in here.  He replied that it's all fear.  I said that it's common sense.  We don't want other people to get it so we all have a responsibility.  He repeated that it's all fear.  I said, no, we are looking out for one another and this is love, and that is what we are called to do.

As he entered the elevator alone, he muttered something indecipherable, and I waited for the next one, which seemed delayed, so I took the stairs.  Hey, it's seventy-one steps, but I need the exercise.  

I shouldn't be surprised by this person's attitude.  We never did get along with each other.  He is a Christian fundamentalist, and last I knew, extremely homophobic, neither does he seem to like anyone who doesn't agree with his distorted vision of the Christian faith.  Which is too bad.  And please note that I called him a Christian fundamentalist, and not a fundamentalist Christian.  There is a difference I think.  This man strikes me as a fundamentalist with a Christian label, so, probably doesn't really have much of a relationship with God, whereas a fundamentalist Christian has a relationship with God but interprets his faith through a more or less literal reading of the Bible.  I have known both.  They tend to be rather narrowly focussed, but Christians who are fundamentalists are also genuinely kind and loving and compassionate people, which to me is what really counts even if I don't happen to agree with their theology.  They are still people who love.  just as there are also Anglicans who are real Christians, because they genuinely love.  There might even be the odd priest who fits that category, but I have yet to meet any.

But a fundamentalist could be a hardcore Baptist, Catholic, or pick any one, or a hardcore Muslim, or a hardcore Orthodox Jew, or a hardcore Buddhist (I mean the kind in Burma who are raping and slaughtering the Rohingya Muslims), or a hardcore atheist, or pick any one.  But they are generally rigid and inflexible thinkers with cold hard little hearts that will simply take whatever faith or nonfaith out of context in order to suit their own cruel and callous worldview, and will simply rot inside their own little prison. And these are people who are most to be pitied because they have most likely grown up and gone through their lives completely deprived of unconditional love.

But love itself is a challenge.  A huge challenge.  Love does not entitle us to judge others but equips and empowers us to walk in their shoes, to learn what it is like to live in another's skin.  This is also called empathy, but this is also key to seeing love set in motion among us, once we have stopped complaining about how awful everything is, once we have gone into the silence to reflect a bit, once we have really opened our own hearts to consider what part we could play in order to change things just a little bit, starting with ourselves, and reaching beyond ourselves in order to touch and  be touched by one another's lives.

 

Theology Of Love 18

 The great challenge of the Theology of Love, is in being people who love when the circumstances are least favourable.  We always have the familiar excuses to draw from.  I am tired, hungry, in a hurry, I'm having a bad day, my mother just died, people are behaving like jerks, my spouse is cheating on me, I have cancer, and the beast goes on.

Sometimes we really can't go on.  We are walking the pavement, demoralized, broken down, destroyed.  Those are the times we usually feel least capable of loving, because we are so completely burntout  and empty  Nothing resonates with life.  The music has died.  

I have been there.  We have all been there.  I remember when my mother died.  I arrived at the hospital just a half hour or so on the late side and she lay there in her bed in her deepest rest.   My aunt and I held each other up for a while, then I saw the people I was in ministry with, then I visited for a while with my father and brother.  After that I was downtown for ministry and to give pastoral care.  I must have been insane for doing this.  But the show must go on. 

But it wasn't a show.  The young male and female street hookers had taken me into their lives as a trusted friend.  They were consoling, comforting as we sat together in the coffee shop that night.  They were exchanging the support I had given them, and they were giving back.  I had not planned or prepared for this.  

That was the most crucial lesson of love that I learned that night.  That love is that which is created out of nothing.  Love creates itself out of nothing.  In our deepest darkness, despair, emptiness and loss, there will suddenly appear that tiny little candle burning against the darkness.  

Gentle Reader, cling to that image of the little candle, the little flame, appearing so fragile, so vulnerable to being snuffed out by the fetid draft, only to recover and regain its strength.  I find it interesting that the apartment building I live in is named Candela Place.  Candela is the Spanish word for that little candle flame, that tiny light of hope burning in the darkness, and guiding us through the darkness into the realms of light.

Theology Of Love 17

 I had an interesting chat today with one of my clients.  We were talking about cosmetic surgery, of how when a woman, or, increasingly, man, goes under the knife, the result is almost never that of someone looking suddenly like a twenty-five year old even though they are over sixty.  Rather, they look like a  person over sixty who has had cosmetic surgery.  I have often wondered about the whole subject around cosmetic surgery.  Certainly it is great if you have been severely disfigured in an accident, or were born disfigured that there is that kind of recourse, given the fear and ignorance in so many people when it comes to how anyone is often treated even if they look just a little bit different.  Then there are those minor cosmetic adjustments.  For example, I remember a kid in school getting his ears done.  They were not Dumbo or Martian ears, I will have you know, but they did stick out just a little.  And I do not recall even once hearing anyone taunt this boy about his funny ears.  But, when he was around twelve or so, he got his ears fixed.  There was some dumb alibi about problems with the cartilage.  Well and good, and the result did look rather nice.  But, whatever for, anyway?  He was not particularly popular, by the way, nor unpopular.  We did kind of end up for a few months in the same loosely formed clique, but I cannot recall anyone suddenly giving him flowers and candy just because he happened to have ears now that were a little more ordinary.

I do know of two women, sisters, who both had their breasts reduced, but that was from the extra weight they had to carry and it was making their backs hurt.  I remember their priest, giggling like a schoolboy when he told me about going over to see them to give them both a blessing before they went into surgery for their boob job.  

And then there are noses.  Except for Barbra Streisand, one of America's most famous, glamourous and wealthy entertainers.   She is proud of her nose, and rightly so.  

How about Dolly Parton, whose wax museum double looks almost as real as her?  And ditto for Madonna.  And then there was Joan Rivers and we won't even mention Captain Kirk, the space traveller also known as William Shatner.  How much have they paid in order to look two or three decades younger, even if their real success is coming off as geezers with flawlessly tight faces, bums, and well.....

So, a lot of people don't want to get old, and they especially don't want to look like they're getting old , and almost everyone is terrified of ageing and death, no matter how ridiculous they end up looking and how many hundreds of thousands, how many millions of dollars get wasted.  Of course one is going to think how many hungry children could get properly fed, how many homeless could get housing on that money instead.  But with the exception of those who really need the surgery,such as the sisters with the painfully large boobs, I cannot think of anyone else going under the scalpel having motives more noble than getting easily laid by attractive younger partners, or maintaining the adoration of their chronically stupid fans, or simply propping up their very fragile self-esteem on strategically added silicon and botox.  Yes, people like that are often well-moneyed, some richer than Croesus,  They can afford it.  And it's their money.

But except for movie stars running foundations for the empowerment of refugee women, or the humane treatment of orphan puppies, or pick any one otherwise noble cause, it doesn't require a lot of cynicism for someone to imagine that their charitable endeavours are at least partly vehicles for their own self-promotion, and any amount of money that could be used wisely and generously in order to improve the quality of other people's lives are simply going to the bank accounts of their cosmetic surgeons, and granny and grandpa's payoff is they get to totter off looking like mannequins or wax dummies, but not one single year younger or more beautiful, nor any less vulnerable to all the ailments of old age.

We love ourselves or we love others.  We only get it both ways when we put others ahead of ourselves.  But within reason of course, and it is going to be up to each one of us to set our own boundaries in these matters.  But if we really start reaching out in love to others, even when we feel we have nothing to give, the love does come to birth, and we don't end up wasting valuable resources on making ourselves ridiculous on any level as a tradeoff for our runaway vanity and fear of mortality.  That is the only kind of self love that I believe to be truly acceptable, which is the fruit of selflessness.

Theology Of Love 16

 Love flows like blood from our wounds.  It flows like tears from our grief.  It flows in the sweat of our labours.  As some of you already know, Gentle Reader, I do not do comparative religions.  I am not interested in declaring that my faith rocks, all others suck.  And I don't even believe that.  My God is not better than your God.  There already is one God, the same God that created, sustains and loves us all.  But I do not write about other faiths, not because I don't agree with them, nor because I think they are inferior.  I write only about my faith because I am a Christian.  I respect Buddhists and Buddhism, Jews and Judaism, Muslims and Islam.  I am not interested in converting or persuading others to walk in the way that I walk.  That is God's business, not mine.  It is the Holy Spirit that converts, that draws us to Christ.  Does the Holy Spirit draw people to the other faiths?  I don't know.  As I said, that is none of my business, and it is not for me to judge.

But I will write about what is real to me.  Which is Jesus.  But which Jesus?  I had a conversation about that this morning with my friend (whom I consider my closest friend) in Medellín, Colombia.  I told him how the direction my life has taken, since I accepted Christ, has been dominated by certain themes and key words:  Beauty...Love...Truth...Spirituality...Creativity...Justice...Humour....Mercy...Life....Reconciliation...,Joy....Celebration....Forgiveness....Humility....Dignity...Integrity...Laughter....Gentleness...Tenderness...Generosity...Warmth...Openness....Respect...Playfulness....Wholeness....Grace...Wisdom...Hope...Courage...Adventure..

God became real to me, not as an abstract or biblical or theoretical concept that one can or cannot intellectually assent to or dismiss.  But God, in the living force of his presence, when the Holy Spirit first filled and flooded me and I was swept up in a prolonged ecstasy of joy and release such as I had never experienced before, and that I have come only close at times to experiencing since.  It was in a basement room.  There were maybe seven or eight of us.  We were prying.  And then, as the others laid their hands on anyone who desired the gift of the Holy Spirit, so descended the Rushing Mighty Wind.  The impact has never really gone away.  I know what happened.  I simply yielded to God every bit of my resistance to his love and grace.  Literally, my life has never been the same.  Literally, I have never felt so completely alive.

So, Jesus is real to me.  Not simply from the pages of the New Testament, but as the daily reality of his presence with me.  This does not make me mentally ill.  I am not delusional, I do not have schizotypal disorder.  This is actually a very typical and familiar experience to Christians of a Pentecostal or Charismatic or mystical orientation.  

But what cones with this experience, is the wounding of love.  Jesus could only truly pour out his love for us, the love of God his Father, through the wounds of the nails that held his frail body to the cross.  When he rose from the dead, he showed to his disciples those very same wounds that he took up in his body to heaven.  Those wounds, that agony, darkness and abandonment that he shared with us in his passion he now shares with us every day, no matter where or who we are, no matter what we are suffering, no matter what has been done to us.  It is the trauma of wounding that gives birth to love, and if we are to walk and live as children of love then we cannot escape this wounding.  It is the very instrument that enables us to channel the healing love and grace of God, not God the abstract concept, but the living reality that brought to birth this universe and that inhabits and sustains every subatomic particle of the cosmos.  And that, darlings, is the Theolgy of love!

Theology Of Love 15

 So, what does love look like?  A friend in Colombia just read to me some bible verses in English, but I am not sure if they really square with the idea I am trying to promulgate.  I won't repeat the text here, but the idea comes across as a God who only likes those who like him, and will do vindictive and nasty things to his enemies.  The one line that resonates with me is where Jesus says that the prince of this world is now cast out.  But that says something rather different than portraying a God who is winning a battle against warring hierarchies.  I am not disagreeing or disputing with the texts by the way.  I do believe that such things are easily taken out of context in our efforts to shape a view of God as made in our own image, rather than vice versa.  And this also goes for the writers of these texts, and here I am about to get in trouble with any biblical purists or literalists who might happen to be reading right now, but you heard it first from me.

Yes, I believe that the scriptures that constitute the Old and the New Testaments are inspired by God.  However, the words were written down and transcribed by human beings.  Which is to say, by imperfect human beings.  Whatever God was trying to say to them was still going to be filtered, and at times distorted, by their own fallen, broken and festering humanity.  It's inevitable.  God knows all this in advance by the way.  He knows that we are never going to get it quite right, but he still wants to communicate with us and through us.  What is communicated is always going to carry the distortion of the prejudices and limitations of the person receiving the message, as well as the limitations, mores and prejudices that they were living under during the time and within the place they happened to be living.

When God is presented in the scriptures as a vengeful deity, that is the cry for justice, warped by human rage and suffering, that will also be written into the scripture.  It is going to be unavoidable.  That isn't to say that the light doesn't shine through in the scriptures.  In some places we read, the light is always dazzling and pure.  And even when in the Old Testament, and in some of the writings of Paul, God can come across as vindictive and wrathful, I think it could also be read as the absolute protective love that God has towards all of us.  Yes, that love is brought into fruition in the lives of those of us who put our trust in him, but his love also extends to those who neither know him or want him, and God tasks us with the calling to be instruments and vectors of that very love and grace to those same unfortunates who would rather carry on in their selfish and self-centred little lives, undisturbed and unchallenged by annoying Christians.

Even if Jesus was incredibly rude to the Pharisees, they certainly had it coming, and in his condemnations of their selfish hypocrisy you hear the cry of love and the cry for justice and vindication.  So then, our job, our task, would be to make real in our lives that vindication, as we go forth among our brothers and sisters of the multitudes carrying the light of his love and grace as instruments of healing and grace and redemptive kindness.  If anyone is to be punished for their sins, well, that is more God's concern than ours, and suffice it to say that sin itself is going to be our punishment, because sin simply means turning away from all that is good, true, beautiful and loving in order to walk and live in the ways of destruction.

How could we get wrong something so simple?  But that, Gentle Reader, is something we are all only too good at doing!

Theology Of Love 14

 I am just having a look at Clement of Alexandria, one of the early church fathers.  His writings were apparently influential to Brother Lawrence of the Practice of the Presence of God.  Again, I am struck by the huge emphasis on being theologically correct.  There is little or nothing about our call to serve Christ through loving others.  I am thinking again of the letter of James, particularly his injunction that faith without works is dead, that our faith is made perfect through our good works, which is to say, faith is perfected by love.  

I think that this has been historically the Church's major failing.  Even in the writings of St. Paul the Apostle, making up the bulk of the New Testament following the Gospels, there is a lot on theology, the nature of God and Christ, and of the importance of believers getting along well.  There is some mention of love, particularly in his famous hymn about love in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians.  But it is a bit of a no.brainer that if Paul, who is credited as the first architect of the Church even before Augustine, would be somewhat lacking in teaching about love, then even less mention of love would be found in the teachings that were to follow through the church fathers and those who came after them.  

I am pointing this out by way of contrasting between Jesus as we have come to understand him through the Gospels, and his purported followers and representatives who were to come after.  Jesus' ministry is full of and defined by his love for others.  His desire and power to heal, to set people free, to feed and comfort, reassure and confirm.  Even in his stinging rebukes against the Pharisees one can only read the holy indignation of love.

I find the lack of love in the rest of the New Testament unfortunate, because this appears to have set in motion the direction of the development of the Christian faith, not as the power of divine love in action in and through the lives of imperfect humans, but as a complex collection of teachings about the nature of God's truth, especially setting the Christian faith against any opposing teaching, cult or religion.  

This is not to dis theology, nor it's importance.  We need that anchor, we need the ballast of sound biblical teaching.  But even more, we need the empowerment to set in motion the very heart of love that is the heart of God who through Jesus went to his most ignominious death for us.  Particularly I don't think we need so much to be reading often what others thought of Jesus, because through his Holy Spirit, Jesus is very capable and very willing to reveal himself to us.  And he is particularly capable of revealing himself through our mutual interactions, through the way we treat one another and those around us.  

I am under the impression that in the early church there was a huge emphasis on protecting the faithful from the evil and corrupt world they were living in.  The church, following the great spiritual outpouring just following Christ's death, resurrection and ascension,  turned inward.  It was inevitable.  They were hated and ruthlessly persecuted by the authorities, and being a new religion, the pressure to maintain pure and untainted their still fragile identity must have been something enormous.  

But somehow, care for the most fragile and vulnerable must have got sidelined, as in the early centuries leading up to Augustine, and Constantine the Great, became more and more focussed on developing the canon of Christian scripture and, of course, defending biblical truth.  The Christian religion that Constantine made the official and only legitimate faith of the Roman Empire, must already have been sufficiently degraded and spiritually disemboweled disempowered to be so easily bastardised by the rulers and pomp and authority and splendour of the very world that put to death our Saviour and Lord.

So, the legacy of the Church became that of generation upon generation of sanctimonious hypocrites parading about in robes and jewels, proclaiming the truth of the religion of Jesus, while treading underfoot the very people, meek, humble and poor in spirit that Jesus proclaimed as the inheritors of the earth and the kingdom of heaven.

It isn't that people care how much we know.  They want to know how much we care.  Or if we even care at all.  If we really love the way Jesus loves us.   And that is the very heart of the Gospel.

Theology Of Love 13

 I have read some of the lives and writing of the great mystics of the church, and I have always found them somewhat wanting.  These women and men were all famous for their visions, revelations and direct experience of the very presence of God.  Some of them were absolutely amazing.  Others were just, well, kind of weird.  I think a lot, maybe all of them, would be on medication and living in a locked ward, or under careful community supervision if they were alive today in the twenty-first century Canada.  This isn't to say that any of them were actually certifiably crazy.  Rather, now that few seem to believe in any god that is not themselves, spiritual experience is often held in suspicion, especially by the psychiatric industry.   Being one myself who has a tendency towards spiritual and sometimes paranormal experiences my psychiatrist, whom I saw for four years decided, after I disclosed to him some of my experiences, to diagnose me with having schizotypal disorder, something he never informed me of.  I only by accident became privy to this information just two years ago.  Fortunately it is not a diagnosis that fits.  But my shrink was of the old school, strongly influenced by Freud, and likely a confirmed atheist, so, how else was he going to interpret my spiritual experiences as I revealed them to him?

However, what I want to focus on here has more to do with just what I find to be lacking in the lives and writings of the great mystics.  Including my own favourite, being Julian of Norwich, who wrote some really wonderful things, such as the invocation, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."  She also told of her vision of God holding us in his hand, as though we were a hazelnut, completely safe in his palm.  She was an anchoress, which is to say that she lived always in a tiny cell attached to the church.  She never went out, though people did come to her for her wise counsel.  

I am currently reading about Brother Laurence, famous for his Practice of the Presence of God.  He was a very simple monk in the seventeenth century, French.  He wrote and spoke of his simple daily experience of encountering God in all the small and trivial every day duties and activities in his life.  It makes for wonderful reading.  But this time I was left wondering, what is missing here?

I think I know now what is missing from the saints, the mystics and their writings.  Very few seemed to really involve or connect themselves in loving, caring and redemptive ways with the lives of ordinary people, and especially those who suffered.  I am thinking here specifically of the mystics.  Among the Catholic saints we have Francis of Assisi, for example, whose entire life he dedicated to the care and service of the most vulnerable.  But in the writings of and about Brother Laurence, or Lady Julian, or others, as inspiring as I find them, this vital human connection is sadly missing.

I myself have long felt and heard something similar to a monastic calling, but not to be lived within the walls of a monastery, nor in a church sanctioned and approved institution, but to live openly, vulnerably, in a way nakedly, as Christ among the people.  As a brother among his siblings, a peer among his peers.  Such was the call that God first gave me when I was on my knees following mass one day at St. James, some thirty-seven years ago, simply overcome with a most powerful sense of God's very and real presence.  I saw in a vision a new born baby lying on the ground, and the words came to me, "I am calling you to live among those who are farthest from me, in the streets, your brothers and sisters who have been excluded from others, from society, the prostitutes, the drug addicts, the mentally ill, the lonely, the abandoned and the rejected, especially to your gay brothers and sisters.  You are to be among them as my presence and you are to find me in them and be their friend.  Not an evangelist, not a missionary, but their friend and their brother."  

That is more or less how I heard the call, though I cannot recall the exact words.  To this day, Gentle Reader, and in the last few months with renewed momentum, I have felt called to live this way, while maintaining a deep and close walk with our Saviour.  Please pray for me and my calling as I renew and am renewed in this way over the coming months.

love,

Aaron

Theology Of Love 12

 It is hard sometimes not to get annoyed with other people.  A lot of us really don't seem to have a clue, the way we wander and stumble around as though we are the only ones in the universe.  That kind of self-absorption seems quite rampant. That is why I still make an effort to engage with strangers every day, even if it's just saying hi to some random person on the sidewalk.  It is still human contact.  It helps draw us both out of ourselves.  It helps pull our heads out of our heinies.  There are of course places where I wish I was the only human present.  The Stanley Park Seawall, for example or anywhere in the forest.  There is nothing that can so wreck for me what should be a quiet and solitary hike as two or three people on the trail yapping behind me, as occurred today for a brief while. Usually I simply stand aside, wait for them to pass, then slowly resume my journey till they are well out of sight.

Yes, I know that seems antisocial, but let me explain.  Not a lot of people go into the forest with the express purpose of encountering and celebrating, apart from birdsong and the calls of ravens and eagles, the silence of nature.  A lot of people are afraid of that, which is why so many won't venture anywhere outside, not even out into nature, without their precious little earbuds, or, much worse, carrying their own little ghetto blaster with them.  We must be safe, you know, from the sounds of nature, and especially from the terrifying silence of our own inner void.  So, Gentle Reader, you will understand why I can find the presence of others in the forest jarring or annoying.  Because they simply are jarring and annoying.

However, were I to trip and sprain my ankle, or worse, break an arm or a leg, what would I do with no one around to help me?  And I still say hi to random strangers I meet on the trail, but I do draw the line at being followed.   The fact of the matter is, despite our often legitimate need for solitude, we humans are a social animal.  We are wholly social.  Our survival depends on one another.  Even if we are annoying.  Even if hell is other people.  

I am reminded here of the spiritual but not religious folk.  You know what I mean, what Buddhists, I mean real hardcore Buddhists, sneeringly refer to as "McMindfulness."  It's really a consumerist, faux-spirituality, because other people are usually excluded and it's all about personal experience and personal emotional gratification.  It is all about self.  

By extension, any genuine true, authentic spirituality is going to have to involve other people.  We are not on this dear earth simply to love ourselves, darlings!  If we are truly spiritual, if we really are in touch with God, or the Universe, or call it what you want, then we are going to have to interact with others.  It's unavoidable.  It's in the contract.  As annoying as we are to one another, and I happen to also know that I can also be very annoying to others, that very annoyance can be the very instrument of grace to draw us closer to God, or at least to teach us some new things about ourselves, which is often the same thing.  This is why the letter of James (Santiago in Spanish) is one of my favourite documents in the New Testament.  When he writes things like "True religion and undefiled before the father is this: to visit widows and orphans in their distress and keep yourselves unspotted from the world."

It is in our interactions with one another that God really becomes present.  It is in one another that we meet Jesus.  It is through one another that we learn to love and to be loved.   I sometimes tell one of my friends in my frequent emails that I love him.  But he also knows that I only want him to return to me no more than ten percent of the love that I send him.  I tell him to pass the rest of it on to others.  And that is how I seek to walk in a spirit of love, grace, mercy and justice with all of you, my Gentle Reader.  Sleep tight!

Theology Of Love 11

 It is impossible to write about divine love without somehow putting myself in the clothing of the hypocrite.  Embarking on this project has brought on some rather intense self-examination.  For example, right now, I am in the midst of terminating one of my work contracts, and all because the supervisor is toxic and for fifteen years has been driving me crazy.  Now I can afford to leave without wondering about how I will pay for food or rent.  I do not hate this person.  I actually like him as a  person.  But his mean spirited and disrespectful style of supervision is making it very easy for me to hate him.  And I do not want to go any further with this.

We sometimes have to impose distance for our own,safety or for the safety of others.  I have ended some friendships for that very reason.  Things had become so toxic, the other party had become so steeped in negative and destructive attitudes and opinions and behaviour (I once ended a friendhsip because someone had turned into an unrepentant white supremacist), and were increasingly turning against me, that I have had to say goodbye.  And others have had to do the same to me on occasion.

No relationship, be it marriage, familial, romantic, friendship or professional, should be allowed to last once it turns into something dangerous and toxic.  Both parties have to be ready and willing to change, and to distance from each other if necessary, or it could only get uglier.  And even dangerous.

I guess where I would like to draw the line is in the whole rea of permanence.  There is a general understanding with the ethos de jour that no relationship is going to be permanent.  I think this is partly true.  I would like to modify this thinking a little.  Rather, I would prefer to say that no relationship is going to remain permanent in its current form.  The fact that we are both human beings means that on some level we are going to have to co-exist.  My supervisor and I are no longer going to work together, and it is less than likely that we will ever be friends, but not impossible.  I like to remain open to possibilities of reconciliation.

In the meantime, everyone has the right to be safe. Which also means that others have the right to feel safe around me, and if they cannot feel safe around me, then they will have to be safe from me, or away from me. And vice-versa.  

And it takes both to get on the same page, or nothing happens.  I am recalling my very negative experience of living briefly with an extremely difficult individual.  We were both homeless and couch-surfing.  I believe also that this individual is a closet case.  We were both staying in the home of mutual friends.  They were away for a couple of weeks so we were going to take care of their house while they were gone.  Big mistake.  This individual was an absolute pig.  Whenever I mentioned his dirty dishes in the sink, he simply ignored me and let them pile higher.  I was not going to give him the satisfaction of cleaning up afer him (I was forty-two then, he was thirty.  We were not kids!) He also assumed, incorrectly, that I was sexually attracted to him.  He got into touching me inappropriately, and then started parading around naked in front of me.  I just told him to get dressed and leave me alone.  Our friends returned and I got away from this jerk as quickly as possible.

About four years ago, I was standing in line at Service Canada, for information about applying for my old age pension.  He was there as well, likely to apply for employment insurance.  We hadn't seen each other in almost twenty years.  He greeted me from behind by flicking me on the ear with his finger.  I glared at him, told him to never touch me or approach me again.

If it ever occurs to him to accept responsibility for his behaviour and sincerely apologize I might give him the time of day.  I forgave him years ago.  But I am not letting this person anywhere near me unless there is clear evidence that he has changed.  This is about safety.   For both of us.  In the meantime, distance.

Theology Of Love 10

 "Must be exhausting". He was perhaps a little younger than me, but it is often hard to tell, but I would guess him to be somewhere in his fifties, a short, balding dumpy little guy who didn't seem to much like engaging with others.  I first talked to him when I offered him the newspaper I had put aside, because I wanted to work on some art while sheltering in the coffee shop from the rain.  Not even saying thanks anyway, he just said, "Nah, I already know what's going on in the world.".  And I concurred that with the internet we tend to find things out really fast.  He seated himself at a table near mine, facing me, and began to attack his lunch with gusto.  He ate with the self-absorbed abstraction of someone who has never shared a meal in his life.  It was really quite disgusting, and as he shoved his sandwich in his mouth I really came to understand in a new way the term pie hole.

Perhaps because he could see me watching him, but more likely he just wanted to move, but as he was changing tables I noticed that his umbrella had been left behind, so I reminded him.  In a mildly defensive tone he assured me that he had not forgotten it, and by way of making an excuse I mentioned that I work in support services, so I'm in the habit of watching out for others.  That was when he said that it must be exhausting.   I replied that I love it.  I didn't quite pick up his reply, but decided to let it go. 

I know absolutely nothing about that person, though I did get a sense that he was probably an introvert, likely not with a lot of, if any, close friends.  Some people don't have close friends, and they really seem okay with it.  I don't know.  For me that would be a sad and lonely existence.  But there are those who so love themselves, and really only love themselves,  And that truly fits with the ethos de jour.  We are supposed to love ourselves.  We can only love others if we love ourselves.  But really, when you already love yourself, why bother waste your effort and energy on someone else.  Why make love to your partner when you already have a bottle of baby oil on your bedside table?  (not that I wish to be vulgar Gentle Reader, and really there are many diffenent uses for baby oil.  But I don't think I would use it for frying onions!)

Of course, doing any kind of support work can be exhausting.  Sometimes it is.  So is working  the cash till at a No Frills, or a Shopper's Drug Mart.   On occasion I have found my job exhausting.  Occasionally there is that client from hell.  Or that supervisor from hell (I'm just in the process of bailing from that kind of supervisor)  But if I were given a choice of occupations, I still would not be working in a No Frills or in a Shoppers.  I love what I do.  

Indeed, without love, I would not be able to do my job.  Without love, I would be coming home exhausted every day.  Without love, I would be a reasonably happy introvert, keeping everybody away from me, a dumpy balding old guy mindlessly stuffing my pie hole while playing Texas Holdum on my laptop or looking at cat videos on Youtube.  I would love myself, sure, and likely no one else, because for me no one else would have existence.  

It isn't that I can't be alone.  I love being alone.  Today I walked, alone, into East Vancouver.  Sometimes greetings were exchanged with friendly strangers. I came home, and I live alone.  I had lunch alone in my little apartment, did some art, took a long nap, then did some more art after which I had a visit on Skype with an old and very dear friend.  Yesterday I was chatting with two other close friends, in Colombia and Costa Rica.  In between those visits, I spent the day alone, when I encountered the little introverted guy in the coffee shop.  

I am comfortable alone.  And I love being with people.  It isn't that I love myself, or not, nor that I just love others.  Rather, I love all of us, because when it is really love, then we don't have to distinguish between self and the other, because it is love that draws us together and it is love that makes us all one.

Theology Of Love 9

 Love is many things.  It is never going to be safe.  To love, to receive love, we make ourselves vulnerable.  But there also must be ways of shoring up enough self protection in order to prevent lasting damage or trauma.  Which is to say, to develop such boundaries that we can love safely without driving or keeping other people out of our lives.  There is no simple formula to this and more often than not this is something that we can only learn the hard way, which is to say through difficult and trying experience.

When I was younger I was very open to people, often too open, and very vulnerable, and this kind of openness to others seems to have been returned to me in spades, especially since leaving the Anglican Church some months ago.  My time among Anglicans was often painful, especially the twenty odd years I was at St. James, which is high  Anglican.  Everyone, but everyone remained safely armoured beneath the protective and bullet proof folds of their religion.  No one wanted to come out of themselves, no one wanted to risk being open.  No one really wanted to risk friendship.   No one wanted to get close to anyone.  You would simply attend mass, get your religious fix, then go off till next Sunday, or the next day if, like me, you were a daily attender of early morning mass.  Some would stay for breakfast with the clergy.  The conversations were usually very correct, superficial, dry, sometimes intellectual, and no one ever revealed anything personal about themselves.  Very Anglican.  

This was very painful for me, because most of my Christian formation till my mid twenties involved allowing myself to come into close relationships with those who were seeking to live in authentic community, which involved letting down our guard, shedding our personal armour and actually leaving ourselves vulnerable and open to having real relationships with one another.   T

The results were mixed, but generally positive.  I had some very close friends during that time.  But it all eventually disintegrated and for many good reasons.  Here I won't go into my reasons for being in the Anglican Church.  But with the loss of my earlier Christian community, I was in need of some kind of support or ballast, no matter how grey and impersonal.  There were positives, but still at the expense of living and being in a way that was really fully human, fully authentic, and fully open to others, fully open to life itself.  

When I went to stay with my friend in Colombia, I knew that I was going to have to shed all that armour and baggage that I had accrued during my time with the anglicans, especially if I was to in some real and poignant way channel Christ and the Holy Sprit for my friend, while making myself open and receptive to the blessing that God was going to offer me through my new friend.  I now realize that in order to become fully Christian, I would have to become fully human.  In order to become fully human I would have to stop being Anglican.  

So, in her passive-aggressive way,  the archbishop kicked me out of the church by siccing her layer on me, and all because neither she nor my parish priest were interested in giving me any pastoral support at all while I was going through this crisis of change.  This is just as well.  I am now aware that they would have been incapable of helping me, since what was really occurring was God leading me out of the Anglican Church.  for this reason I forgive them both for how they have hurt me, and now I can move on.  I am not interested in renewing contact with them, because we are in such different universes.  And that's okay.   And I really do wish them both well.

Now I am moving on, in a spirit  of love and forgiveness.  As far as reconciliation is concerned, that can only really occur when both parties are fully willing, and each is fully prepared to accept responsibility.  This seldom really happens, but that is no excuse for not continuing to love, continuing to forgive, continuing to see or at least to look for Christ in the other.  But we sometimes are going to have to be willing and prepared to look through the curtain of tears and blood, because without suffering there is not going to be any love.  They are inextricable..  Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning!

Theology Of Love 8

 There is, when it comes to forgiveness, the fine print.  It is very small, and there is lots of it. For example, how much am I going to let someone back into my life once I have forgiven them?  Let me count the ways.  Before any relationship can be fully restored to what it was in the past, both parties have to be in a place where they are both ready and willing.  There has to be a new point from which mutual trust can begin to develop again.  That point is called respect.  By the same token, there is also every  possibility, maybe probability that both, or one party, have moved on in their lives, so that it is no longer going to be realistic to even think of restoring the broken relationship.  Lots of variables here, and one size is not going to fit all (it never does, Gentle Reader!)

For example, a woman or a man who has been in a relationship where they are being physically or sexually abused has every right to access help and support to get away from the relationship and the abuser as quickly as possible and for the abusive partner to be brought to justice.  Meanwhile, no one has the right to tell her that she has to forgive him.  And even if she is able to make that huge and critical step, the likelihood of restoring the relationship should remain particularly remote, because it is highly possible to forgive someone without permitting them to be able to harm you again.  In fact, this is a measure that is fully and completely necessary for anyone to be able to successfully move on in their lives.

Similarly, I am now in the process of resigning from a worksite where I have had a semi-toxic relationship with the same supervisor over the past fifteen years.  I actually do like this person, but as a supervisor, this individual tends to abuse power, and for me to consent to remaining in that kind of situation with him, no matter what he does or doesn´t do to express remorse or repentance, would simply be unwise and imprudent on my part.  So, it's bye-bye.

I am going to bring into this conversation my own dear and departed mom and dad.  My parents divorced in 1971, finalizing a long, ugly and bitter process that began when they separated legally two years before.  To protect both their privacy I will not mention here the reasons for the divorce, but they were not very fond of each other for a while.  Neither were they very good at being or staying married.

Adding insult to injury, an aunt by marriage, with my uncle (paternal) a fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian, sent my mother a book in the mail, just one year later,.  It was all about a divorced couple reconciling and renewing their marriage vows.  Mom was justifiably offended and indignant.  I don't know if she ever talked to her sister-in-law, but if she did, I would have liked to be a fly on the wall, because my mother was not one to take prisoners.  But the book, like my aunt, was likely going to be full of assumptions, and everyone of you has already heard that when you assume, you are making an ass of you and me.  

For that matter, I couldn't imagine my parents getting back together.  I certainly did not fancy having to live with my father again, and Mom certainly didn't.  But gradually, over the years, they did become friends.  I think they really did forgive each other.  Reconciled?  Well, reconcile is as reconcile does.  Both had new partners, then each ended up living alone again.  Still, no budge in each other's direction.  But clearly they liked each other.  There was respect there.  They had each other's back.  My parents remained good friends until when my mother died from cancer, and Dad was very supportive of both of us as she met her own end.

Some of you reading this will also be aware of some of my own recent issues with the Anglican Church.  Simply put, I was not exactly asked to leave but stonewalled and then threatened by the archbishop´s lawyer. My offense?  I was royally pissed that the priest in my church refused to offer me pastoral support as I was trying to put together a whole series of unsettling experiences I had while I was away in Colombia, and was uncertain that I could continue attending church.  She ignored every one of my emails.  I went to the archbishop.  She also ignored me.  I kept pestering her.  Instead of offering to talk with me she called her lawyer.  I told her lawyer that if I ever hear from him again I would go public about this, and as a warning shot, I contacted CBC Go Public, or, Wealthy Christian Denomination to Sue Low Income Blogger For Asking For Pastoral Support.  

I do not expect rapprochement or reconciliation, simply because those people do not seem to think that I'm worth it.  They have a very castist approach, and for them reconciliation is only something that their church does publicly with native people's.  Virtue signaling, you know.  So, no, I am not holding a grudge, because I understand that they are simply incapable of reconciling with someone who is beneath their dignity.  Would I accept reconciliation?  Of course, but we would have to agree on the terms, and if they don't want to talk to me, then we are never going to know what are the terms, much less agree on them.

Do I hate them?  Not at all.  I feel sorry for them.  Middle class privilege has kept them blind to the riches of Christ, as is often the case with those who draw their paycheque from working for Big Church.  

I am likely never returning to this church or denomination, but for the simple reason that this is a door that God has closed.  No resentment, one of the parishioners there remains a close friend, and I am also on friendly terms with others there.  But to return to the Anglican Church would be also returning to a toxic relationship, and this is where we really need to temper our expectations and understanding of reconciliation.  Since the very structure of said relationship is going to be fraught with abuse and miscommunications, it is better to stay away, to wish the others well, continue to pray for them, and to hope that one day they will pull their heads out of their asses and try to reconcile with me.  But I am keeping low my expectations, because it is also clear to me that they don't think I am worth it.  Even though I am worth it.

Sometimes forgiving others, and moving on into a new situation happen simultaneously.  Indeed they are often one and the same thing.

Theology of Love 7

 Forgiveness is tough, probably one of the hardest things any of us is ever going to have to do.  It is also so completely necessary and vital to our survival as a species.  You heard me the first time!  Without forgiveness, as a species, we could be well approaching our best before date.  There are lessons to be learned, from history, and throughout the world. I will focus on just one, a very familiar, for some a tiresomely familiar theme: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It doesn't look like it's going to end.

Here is a refresher.  Arabs had become in that region the dominant culture over the course of two thousand years, since the displacement of the Jews by the Ancient Romans at around 70 AD.   European Jewry became the dominant strand of the Diaspora, and they were subjected to century after century of brutality and ruthless persecution by the so-called "Christian" host countries where they were living.   Finally came the ultimate assault on the Jews of Europe, the Shoah, or Holocaust, where Hitler's thugs systematically murdered six million Jews in as many years, as well as millions of other people he did not happen to like much.  

Jews had already been returning to Palestine since the nineteenth century, and already the foundations were being laid for the modern state of Israel.  Meanwhile, there were already people there.  Those people, in the millions were violently displaced by the colonizing Jews and have lived on their own land in refugee camps ever since.  Under their very noses, they and their descendants have had to watch helplessly while the newly minted Israelis ploughed their houses, fields and villages to the ground in order to set up their own dear little nation-state.

Who wouldn't be pissed?  Add to this mess, neither Muslim Arabs nor Jewish Israelis have a culture of forgiveness and reconciliation.  To many it is a foreign concept.  It is all tribalism, it is all vetting and clinging to ancient grudges, maintaining and defending their honour, no matter how many heads get blown off, heads usually belonging to innocent bystanders.

Agreed, this is an oversimplification, and I might appear to be taking sides, even if I am not, but that is what happens when you pit against each other two cultures of grudge holding and blood feuds.  Neither am I going to presume, in this post, to solve the problems of this conflict.  It is here only as an example, Gentle Reader, nothing else.

Throughout history and all over the world are innumerable examples of this.   Nothing gets healed.  Nothing gets restored, and people go on dying.  And now that our weapons of mass destruction have become, well, weapons of mass destruction, so the ante is raised and the stakes now are higher than ever.  We cannot afford to continue in this kind of direction.

It has long been my belief that change on the macro level only occurs once it is well underway on the micro level.  We cannot expect cultures, tribes or races or nations to reconcile without reconciliation and forgiveness really occurring between individuals.  In fact, I will even say that every time we forgive, truly and really forgive others, we are also helping to heal these much wider, more festering, and gaping wounds in our common humanity.  

I am not offering here an easy solution.   But forgiveness alone is going to bring healing to our suffering, wounded, and broken humanity, and forgiveness comes only out of love.  If we do not feel the love, and usually we are not going to be feeling the love, then we have to will the love into existence, by at least giving our consent to forgiving, and to reconciling.  This requires hard work and excruciating self-examination, and we have to be ready for this.

To live in a better world, we first need to become better people.  If you are really serious about becoming a better person, as I am serious about becoming a better person, then here is our challenge.  Think of one person, just one single person, who has hurt you, who has left a scar, who has traumatized you.  Even if you were fired from your job, cheated, lost your spouse to that person, even if that person has defrauded you, has physically injured and disabled you, even if that person has raped you, completely ruined your life.  now, close your eyes, and hold that person up to the Light.  Don't try to forgive them, simply offer and release that person to the light, and let that same light set you free from the outrage and the injury, and that light will fill you, and will begin to heal and restore you.  Every time that person comes to your mind, no matter how painful, see that person being lifted into the light, repeat and keep repeating, even if it takes weeks, months, even if it takes years, and you will be free.  Not all at once, but you will be free.