The writings of the New Testament draw a very clear line from the animal sacrifices used to atone for sins practiced by the Jews and the death of Jesus on the cross. For example, Ephesians 1:7 says that we have “redemption by his blood”. Revelation 7:11 says of the saints “they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” However, in a rather complicated passage from Hebrews explaining why the death of Jesus was more perfect and more complete than the sacrifices which were offered by the priests in the temple for the forgiveness of sins, Paul refers back to Psalm 40 which makes the reality of sacrifice clear: “Sacrifice and offering you do not want; but ears open to obedience you gave me. Holocausts and sin-offerings you do not require; so I said, ‘Here I am . . . To do your will is my delight.’” And at the risk of offending my Catholic friends who hold the doctrine of transubstantiation*, Jesus further distances the will of God from the desire for blood by declaring that the wine and bread of the Passover and communion meals were metaphorically his blood and body. Since none of the disciples commented on the strange, metallic taste of the drink he gave them or the sweet, porky taste of the bread, I think we can assume that the wine and bread remained wine and bread and the need for actual blood is done. Again, the need for the human ritual portion of the relationship between God and man was complete and the God-given portion now emerges cleaner and clearer than before.

However, if God didn’t require the sacrifice of Jesus as a sort of ultimate blood-sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, this raises the question of why the line gets drawn between the death of Jesus and the animal sacrifices used for the atonement of sin by the Jews.  If the death of Jesus was an entirely human conceived, motivated and executed event, does it make sense that God would respond as if it were the ultimate act of sacrifice which secured forgiveness of sins?

I am going to argue that it is, in fact, very much in line with the picture which Jesus painted in the story of the prodigal son. Here in the west, particularly the modern west, we tend to read the prodigal son story as a touching, although not necessarily remarkable story. We are familiar with the rebellious son with little regard for his parents who destroys his life. We are even familiar with parents who are just happy to have their children back once they have come to the end of their rope. Heck, we watch similar stories play out every week on Intervention. However, the story would have sounded and be received much differently by those Jesus told it to.

Kenneth Bailey is a New Testament scholar who has spent his life from childhood living in small, middle eastern villages where life remains the same from generation to generation. He has found that these putatively modern middle eastern villagers are often able to throw light on the context of gospels because they are working from family and community structures and standards which have changed little over the millennia. In his book The Poet and The Peasant, Kenneth Bailey explains that as westerners we miss the full force of the Prodigal Son story:

For over fifteen years I have been asking people of all walks of life from Morocco to India and from Turkey to the Sudan about the implications of a son’s request for his inheritance while the father is still living. The answer has almost always been emphatically the same. . . the conversation runs as follows:

“Has anyone ever made such a request in your village?”

“Never!”

“Could anyone ever make such a request?”

“Impossible!”

“If anyone ever did, what would happen?”

“The father would beat him, of course!”

“Why?”

“This request means – he wants his father to die!” . . .

Bailey goes on to point out that not only was the request outrageous and cruel, but that the son further pressures his father into signing over all rights – including the father’s own right to live off the proceeds of the property for the remainder of his life – to the son. And then the son sells that property.  Bailey quotes another scholar who puts it thus: “he demands his own portion of his goods, and treats the father as if her were already dead.” Elsewhere Bailey notes that when he tells this story to Middle Eastern villagers who have never heard it before they inevitably gasp out loud at the son’s request and shake their heads in disbelief at his subsequent actions. So before his own death, Jesus told a story in which a man’s behavior would have been seen as even more outrageous, cruel and unthinkable to the listeners than his own death would be. People were turned over to be crucified all the time. But no person ever behaved in the way the son in this story does.

In the story, left to his own devices, the son further deginerates. He wastes his inheritance, indulges in all his worst impulses and does things which are unclean, disgusting and vile. The same can be said of what humanity does to Jesus in his crucifixion. Jesus was the inheritance of the Jews – the Messiah. When they received it, they destroyed him much as the son destroys his inheritance.

When the son is completely spent, he realizes that he will not survive on his own and in an act of unmitigated gall returns to his father to ask for work. We are often told that he’s repentant and humbled by his experience, but in reality his plan is the work of a person of very poor character. If he had truly repented and sought to do right, he would have set about finding his own way in the world. He would perhaps even have worked to replace what he had squandered and not have even attempted to return back to his father without being able to offer him restoration for what he had taken. Frankly, if he had possessed any ambition or work ethic, he would never have wound up feeding pigs in the first place. He would have found a real way to make a living. Going back home to ask for work isn’t an act of humility; it’s an act of presumption and an easy way out of his suffering.

This discussion may seem like a diversion from our discussion of the crucifixion, but what I want to establish is a parallel between the behavior of the son in this story and the behavior of humanity towards Jesus. Both are cruel, arrogant betrayals. Both are examples of people indulging their worst impulses and displaying little or no insight into their own faults and failing. The crucifixion of Jesus was a lurid display of unthinkable cruelty, betrayal, uninhibited base impulses much like the behavior of the prodigal son. To understand God’s reaction to the crucifixion, it helps to look at the reaction of the father to his son’s return.

In the story that Jesus tells, the son is returning home and is still a long way off when his father spots him. At this point, the father seizes the chance to completely turn the nature of events. He runs out to meet him. Probably in part to save the boy. His outrageous behavior would have been the talk of the community for some time and the odds of him making it to his father’s house without being accosted by someone weren’t good. So before his son can suffer any further harm from his foolishness, the father rushes out to meet him. He doesn’t even wait for an explanation or apology. There is no groveling or admission of guilt. Instead the father takes the chance to declare that all is well between them. He puts a cloak and a ring on him, demonstrating that this good-for-nothing who has done nothing but evil is accepted back as a full member of the household and thus, the community. He declares a celebration and will hear nothing of the sins of the son or the fact that he is obviously unworthy of such celebration. The father, just like God, meets his son where he is and turns his own flawed, human intentions and actions towards his own purposes – drawing him back into relationship with him.

To say that this is not how it would have happened in real life is to grossly understand the matter. God is often spoken of using father language in scripture because in Ancient Near East cultures the role of the father in a family was so strong, so clear-cut and so well understood that people would immediately comprehend the implications. The father was in charge. The father was the source of all the good things the family had. The father declared right and wrong. The father was revered, served and honored. The father had all rights to make demands and expect that they be met. The obligation of children to the father was complete. A real father in that context would have met a request by a son for his inheritance with violence. He would never have granted it and then further given full control of the property to the insolent child. Not doubt the listeners to Jesus’ story fully expected the son’s return to be met with the violence that should have occurred at the beginning of the story. Instead, the father first humiliates himself by running out to meet him. (Patriarchs do NOT run.) Then he restores him to the place of honored son.

The real message of the story is that the father’s behavior is co
mpletely wound up in his own motivations and character and has nothing to do with the worthiness of the son or any sort of deference to rules and norms. The son’s prepared speech isn’t made because the father isn’t really interested in whatever nonsense is going to come out of the boy’s mouth. His only concern is with re-establishing the relationship he desperately desires with his child. And he will use any excuse that presents itself to move events in that direction.

Is it any less of a leap then to say that God likewise used the death of Jesus at the hands of his children as an opportunity to declare peace with us? By creating a connection between this outrageous event – so full of cruelty, arrogance and betrayal – and the forgiveness of sins, God behaves just as the father in the story of the Prodigal Son does. His only concern is for re-establishing the relationship he desperately desires with his children. Sin had been a continual barrier between mankind and God. The clumsy rituals of sacrifice and the direction provided by the law had kept it from being a fatal breaking of the relationship between God and man. But that simply wasn’t good enough. Like the father in the story, God has no real use for another servant – he has all the angels and heavenly hosts at his disposal. What he really desires is his son. And eventually friends. And even a church which is able to be a partner to Christ – a bride. A real love relationship.

Like the father in the prodigal son story, he uses what is made available to him to move that relationship in just that direction. No longer will sin be a barrier between God and man. It is not the fear of a son towards his father which will motivate the relationship, much less the dependent, servile relationship between master and slave which will finally close the chasm. It is love. Pure and simple. God wants to have a love relationship with us. He wants us to turn from sin out of love, not fear or obligation. He wants us to seek him out of love, not duty or dependency. Yes, he will use fear and obligation and duty and dependency to overcome the problems between us. But in the end, it is his love and nothing else that puts us in right relationship with us. It is his love that declared the death and resurrection of Jesus to be a great victory over sin and death. And it is his love that he uses to draw us ever closer to him. It is his character, and by the death and resurrection of Jesus, he invites us to make it our character as well.

*Regarding transubstantiation, I know it’s a cherished doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, but I hold to the protestant criticism that if we understand the wine and bread to somehow have become the actual body and blood of Christ, then the communion meal becomes a daily sacrifice of Jesus. Hebrews 10 and 11 very clearly lay out that the death of Jesus was a one-time event which unlike the sacrifices of the priests in the temple, would never need to be repeated. That and the obvious reality that the wine remains wine and the bread remains bread. I would accept the idea that they are imbued with the presence of the spirit of Christ, but the doctrine of transubstantiation goes beyond that point and as I said, is in conflict with scriptures, imo.

You might also be interested in:

The Prodigal Son – Hangover Edition

Would You Run?

Let’s start our discussion with the issue of blood sacrifice itself. The first thing to be noted is that blood sacrifice is not something which originated with the Hebrew God. It had been practiced for millennia prior and has occurred all over the world. It is a human invention. In his excellent book Ideas That Changed the World, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto offers the anthropological explanation for the pervasiveness of the practice of blood or animal sacrifice:

Gifts are a common way of establishing reciprocity and cementing relationships between individuals and human groups; by extension, a gift should also work to bind gods and spirits to the human givers, connecting deities to the profane world and alerting them to its needs and concerns. . . During the last 10 millennia . . . sacrifice has acquired a great many meanings: as penance for sin; as thanksgiving; as homage to divinity; as a contribution to the well-being of the Universe; or as a sacrilized gift, considered as an act of worship or of imitation of God.

One of the things which we need to understand about God as revealed in scriptures is that over and over again, God does not wait for us to become acceptable or advanced enough to establish a relationship with him. Instead, he reaches out to meet us where we are and bit by bit draws us forward towards him and away from our previous ideas and ways of doing things. The rituals of animal sacrifices did not reflect a need or demand of God. Instead, by instituting rituals of animal sacrifice God is co-opting a human institution and way of doing things and directing it back to himself with the ultimate result that the human institution drops away while the devotion to God remains.

If we look in scripture the first offering made to God is made by Cain and Abel, which did not turn out so well. But it was not an offering in response to a demand of God. We don’t know what prompted them to make their offerings to begin with; perhaps they were imitating the actions of others around them. The second instance of animal sacrifice which appears in scripture is when God makes his covenant with Abram. Again it is not a sacrifice made in response to a demand on God’s part. The purpose of this sacrifice isn’t Abram seeking to appease or please God, but God’s way of demonstrating his commitment to Abram and the promises made to him. The specific actions of the ritual – cutting the animals in half and passing between them – are noted in other contemporary accounts as a form of sealing an agreement between two parties. The implication was that if either party broke the covenant, they would be cut in half like the sacrificed animals had been. So, we see clearly here God using a ritual of mankind’s own making that Abram would understand and be comfortable with. The first example we have of God demanding a ritual sacrifice is when God tells Abram, now Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. At this time, God then provides a substitution for the sacrifice and the boy’s life is spared. In fact, the first actual instructions from God regarding ritual animal sacrifice don’t come until the law is given through Moses hundreds of years later. By that time, the Hebrews had been living among the Egyptians for many, many generations and would have been heavily influenced by Egyptian religious practices which included animal sacrifices.

I’ve gone through all of this out simply to establish that animal or blood sacrifice did not originate with demands from God at all. Instead, they are almost certainly an example of God meeting people where they were and using what they were already familiar with to turn them towards himself. God didn’t need animals sacrificed to him. But people needed assurances that they were acceptable, forgiven and in right relationship with their God. God uses the already familiar rituals of animal sacrifices to meet the needs of the people, not to meet his own blood thirsty demands.

So we get to the time of Jesus. One of the pressing issues of the religious community during Jesus day was the keeping of the law. The Hebrews were, of course, living under Roman occupation and the keeping of the law had in many ways become a nationalistic rather than a spiritual pursuit. This is part of what accounts for the zealousness of parts of the religious establishment; breaking the Hebrew law was not simply a demonstration of a lack of faith – it was akin to treason. Keeping the peculiar laws of the Hebrew bible was what ensured that the Hebrews would remain a separate nation that could take its rightful place when the Messiah arrived and lead them to victory over their oppressors. In this environment, the law and the sacrifices no longer served to turn the people’s hearts and devotions towards God, but  often served largely secular, political purposes. Once again, God reached out to meet humanity where it was in a way it could understand in order to turn us back to himself again. Enter the Word made flesh – Jesus.

Since the topic at hand is whether God demanded the sacrifice of his son to provide for the forgiveness of our sins, I’m going to skip straight to the death of Jesus here. The first thing we must understand about the death of Jesus is who it originated with. The reality is that throughout Jesus’ ministry there were people who wanted him dead. There are quite a few places in the gospels where Jesus slipped out of town in order to escape those who would kill him. Once again, the fact remains that it was human desire which sought the death of Jesus and not the demands of God. In fact, there was nothing about the execution of Jesus which conformed to the rules of God. Regular rules for trial were ignored. Jesus wasn’t subjected to the scriptural means of death for one who blasphemed – that being stoning. Even the usual proscription against killing during the Passover feast was ignored. And it wasn’t the fury of God which propelled events forward; it was the fury of men which did that.  This was an event of human motivations and means from start to finish.

The claim that the crucifixion of Jesus was a sacrifice demanded by God, ignores the bald, ugly reality of what actually happened. The religious leaders, caring nothing for what God cares for – our hearts and need for redemption – had turned Jesus over to the powers of this world. The people in demanding his execution and the release of Barabbas committed an act of gross betrayal against Jesus who had never harmed anyone and healed many. It was the worst of human nature on display. The soldiers mocked Jesus, mocked his royalty, mocked the miraculous power he had demonstrated purely in service to needy humanity. The means of his death was a rather extreme example of man’s capacity for cruelty towards fellow man. It was carried out by those just doing their jobs – the banality of evil at work 2000 years before we had a term for it. While Jesus suffered on the cross, we see further examples of the difference between God’s ways and mankind’s ways. Before he is even dead, the soldiers amuse themselves with a bit of vice, gambling for his clothes. When he asks for some small comfort – a drink – he is met with yet another example of how people will treat those suffering and offered a dose of vinegar which will not alleviate his suffering but simply makes it worse. All in all, rather than an example of a sacrifice demanded by God, the death of Jesus is a fantastic display of the worst behaviors and traits that humans can muster up. There was nothing about it that reflected God’s desire or demands. This was the work of human beings through and through.

And yet . . . God takes this ugly, evil display of cruelty, vice, power, betrayal, self-interest and arrogance and does what he is wont to do with the things we humans come up with. He uses it to turn us towards himself. It’s as if he says, “are you done now? Are you satisfied? Have you vented your fury and poured out your sinfulness on me to your satisfaction? Fine. Then it is done. You poured out your sin on me and my son. And now, I have redeemed even the worst that you can do. He is risen. He is Lord of Lords and King of Kings now. You sin has no power. It has no power to defeat me and it has no power to separate us any longer. Turn away from it and seek after me.”

This claim that God reacts to this lurid display of human cruelty and sin by declaring it as the means by which we are reconciled to him may seem to be a stretch, but tomorrow I’ll use the story of the prodigal son to explain why this reaction is exactly the way that God behaves with us. I would do it today, but this post is already way too long. But I do have it written already, so if you aren’t already subscribed, you should go do that and it will be delivered into your inbox tomorrow. I know you’ll be waiting with baited breath for its arrival! J

Hi! I’ve heard that you’ve been having a hard time lately so I thought you could use some encouragement. I know that between being sick and hating housework and wishing you could have just one full child free day and night every couple of years, you feel like you’re drowning and can’t hold things together. Heck, I hear that you even lost your purse last week after leaving it on the top of the car. What a bummer! But, you know, shit happens. Shake it off. No use crying over spilt milk and all that. I mean look at all the things you’re juggling. You’ve got 5 kids. Everyday you make sure people are wearing clean clothes and sleeping on clean sheets and some days your own clothes are even clean. You check backpacks and harass errant students and sometimes even remember girl scout meetings before they start. You play with the baby so she doesn’t watch videos all day, take her to the park a few times a week. You read to the girls each night, sing them to sleep and listen to their stories about school each and every day. You have long conversations with your teen boys, harass them to take showers and do their chores. And I hear you’ve gotten some serious yard work done lately. You ask for and listen to all your husband’s work stories, remember the names and roles of people you’ve never met and learn acronyms and jargon so he doesn’t have to stop and explain it to you each time. You remember when he has important meetings, take his glasses off the bed where he leaves them every night and remind him that it’s not good for him or the family if he works until 8 o’clock every night.You make sure there’s a homemade family meal for everyone to sit down to almost every night. And every day you try to tackle a project or at least a room that needs tending to.  That’s a lot for a person who’s been sick and gone through hell in the last couple of years. Heck, that’s a lot for anyone to keep up with! Give yourself credit! Sure, some things are never quite right, but one day at a time. You’re better now than you were before and you’ll be better later than you are now.

I know that you’ve hit some roadblocks, your confidence is extra shaky and you’ve starting thinking that maybe you’ll never accomplish the things that you want to accomplish. Maybe you were an idiot for ever thinking that you could. But I’m here to tell you that’s horse-hockey. Look at you – when your husband left you with 5 kids last summer, and no money and not even an internet connection to work with did you crawl into bed for the next month and a half the way a lot of people do? No! A month after he left you had a book in print. Who does that? You’re amazing! You can do anything. And remember when you thought no one was reading your blog but you kept going day after day and week after week until you dug around and discovered that instead of the 30 subscribers you thought you had, there were over 800? Anyone else would have gotten discouraged and quit, but you didn’t – you just kept believing and pushing forward. Today everything you write is read by 2000-3000 people (that you know of). Sure it’s not best-seller territory yet, but that’s more people than the average church pastor preaches to each week. Not bad for a housewife in Wisconsin.

And it’s not just the numbers and the determination you’ve shown; the things you’ve been writing have helped people. Just the other day you wrote a post on salvation that people told you helped them understand their own salvation better. That’s no small thing! And remember that kid whose adoptive mom thought he had fetal alcohol syndrome? He read your essay on giftedness and showed it to his mom and she wrote you? It turns out the kid was just really smart and finally his mom understood that there wasn’t anything wrong with him. Think of what a difference that made in his life. All over your blog, you have comments from people all around the world thanking you because something you wrote inspired or encouraged or enlightened them. How many people can say that they’ve helped people from all corners of the earth with their ideas and stories? That’s a gift. Don’t let these temporary struggles or the fact that it’s been much harder or longer than you think that you can bear get you down. If you died tomorrow, you would know for a fact that the world is a better place because of you.Not everyone can say that.

Sure you have your doubters and your nay-sayers, but everyone who’s doing anything worthwhile does. And who cares if they don’t agree with you? Who cares if they think you’re arrogant or delusional or whatever? They don’t have to live your life – you do. You know, for the year before he left, I saw how your husband challenged everything you had ever done or even said over the last 20 years. And at the end of it, you could say honestly that you had very rarely been selfish, very rarely chose the easy way out, always done your best to act in love and when you were wrong, you worked through it and became better for it. How many people could have their whole life challenged and honestly say that? You’ve done the best you could and frankly, the best you could is pretty awesome. Yeah, things haven’t always worked out. OK, it feels like nothing’s worked out, but it’s like Samwise tells Frodo in The Lord of the Rings:

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

I mean sure you’re not a hobbit helping to carry the fate of Middle Earth against all odds, but you’re one human doing the best you can with the life you have. It’s your story. And it’s been a fantastic story so far. People would hardly believe you if you told them the whole thing. You know that. It’s up to you to keep your head and keep going. Not everyone is willing to live for what they believe the way you do. Not everyone is willing to bet it all that what they believe is true and right and good. If it’s this hard to get to where you’re going, you must be going somewhere really good, right? Just don’t give up. Not now. You’ve done amazing things. You’ve shown a lot of grit and courage and determination. Not everyone could go through all that you’ve gone through and still believe in themselves or their God. But you have. I know you’re going to make it through.

Lots of love,

Rebecca

The strange thing about the use of the word salvation in scriptures is that it is used as if its meaning were understood. Like when we say ” turn left” we know exactly what “turn left” means. But all that salvation really means is “saved”. From what? Over time, I’ve come to embrace the understanding of salvation that was most common among the ancient church fathers and which is still the teaching of Eastern Orthodox theology: theosis.

Before I get into exactly what theosis is, let’s go back to the beginning. What are we being saved from? Why do we need salvation to begin with? In the beginning, we were made in the image of God. It means being made in the likeness of God. Elsewhere in scripture the word “image” is used to describe a son being the image of his father or an idol shaped to look like something else. With the fall, that image becomes obscured. (BTW, you should read this earlier Upside Down World discussion of original sin that probably makes more sense than other things you’ve been taught about it.)

In scripture sin is usually spoken of in terms of being unclean, dirty, filthy. Sin obscures that core of who we are – image bearers. But it can’t change it or take it away. Think of it like a diamond that gets left in a tide pool and becomes encrusted with mud, bits of shells, plant materials, maybe even eaten and crapped back out. The diamond is still there, unchanged. But it has been completely encrusted with filth until there is no remaining visible sign of it’s existence.  There are many verses in scripture which speak of our sins being washed away. We are washed in the blood of Christ. And once those sins are washed away, what is revealed? Who we really are – images of the God who created us. This is what salvation is. Being redeemed from the effects of sin – our own and other’s – and restored to the very image of God.

This restoration to the “image of God” the teaching of theosis. When this restoration of a person to who they were created to be occurs, there is no longer any impediment to union with God. That is salvation. As I mentioned earlier, theosis was the teaching of the ancient church and remains the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Theosis is union with God. It is being saved, restored, redeemed. It means becoming the person we were created to be and the person each of us has been created to be is an image of God. (Here’s a discussion of theosis that I think it quite good. And here’s the wiki entry on it.)

Now, the reality is that as humans we will always have what we see as flaws. We don’t know everything. We make mistakes. We think dumb things. We do things with good intentions that turn out horribly. We fart and pick our noses and yawn while someone else is talking to us. And this is true of the greatest saint as much so as it is true of a drug addled gutter dweller. So, what does it mean to be restored to the image of God? If theosis were real, wouldn’t we expect to see at least some Christians who never slip up, never misjudge or make mistakes? Well, no. We think that because we misunderstand what perfection means in God’s world. In Matthew 5:48 Jesus tells us “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Well, how is our heavenly Father perfect? If we go back a couple of verses to Matthew 5:45 we find the answer: “God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” God is perfect because his love is perfect. His love is perfect because it comes out of who he is. It is not a reaction to other people, other events, other circumstances.

God’s love comes from who he is – nothing more, nothing less. Jesus is telling us to be perfect like that; loving no matter whether the object of your love deserves it or not. In favorable or unfavorable circumstances, our love must remain the same. When our salvation is complete and the essance of who we have been created to be is revealed without the obscuring effects of sins (again – our own as well as other’s), we too will love because it is the essance of who we are. This is God’s perfection. Not having a great personality or always making excellent choices or having impeccible taste or always knowing the right things to say. Just that in all circumstances our behavior, attitude and choices would be motivated by love. When we can do that, we have truly been saved. As we allow God to work in us and learn to love as He loves, that is the “working out our salvation” that Paul refers to.

In another day or two or week depending on how my brain holds up, I’ll get into Jesus’ place in salvation. But I suppose that’s enough of my upside down thinking for today!

The Myth of Sex by Tim Muldoon

This is the myth of all myths: that people could use each other and still remember what compassion and tenderness looked and felt like.

In the beginning, the LORD created man and woman in his image.

He blessed them and made them fruitful. Among his many gifts he gave man the gift of physical strength to work, and he gave woman the gift of compassion to cultivate relationships.

Together, man and woman learned each other’s gifts. Woman developed strength and offered her work as an act of compassion. Man learned compassion with his wife and child.

And they and their offspring numbered like the stars in the heavens, and they were happy. And the LORD saw that it was good.

But the serpent, the most cunning of creatures, was jealous of their happiness, and he resolved to put enmity between the men and the women.

So he whispered in the ear of the men as they lay asleep: “You are a man. Use your power to control the woman.”

And he whispered in the ear of the women as they lay asleep: “You are a woman. Use your body to control the man.”

So the men began to use their power to control the women. They kept the women away from their work. And the women stayed at home.

And the women began to use their bodies to control the men. They seduced the men and made them do their bidding.

And the men became rivals with one another over the women.

And the women became rivals with one another over the men.

The men sought more and more power over their rivals so they could have the best women.

The women sought more and more beauty than their rivals so they could have the best men.

So the men began to fight and kill. The strongest men lay with many women, but did not know them, and did not learn compassion for them or their children. Over time, they forgot what compassion was like and wanted only to lay with the best women. But the poorest men remembered.

And the women began to seduce men and subdue them. The most beautiful lay with many men, and they too forgot what compassion was like and wanted only to control the men. But the poorest women remembered.

And the children of the strongest men and the most beautiful women did not learn compassion. They learned only competition, and they were fierce.

These children grew into men and women who believed that the world was a battleground.

The men learned the arts of war to defeat their rivals. Their descendants learned the newer arts of war in the stock market, the boardroom, the athletic field.

The women learned the arts of seduction to defeat their rivals. They painted their faces; they bound their feet; they wore corsets. Their descendants learned the newer arts of seduction with plastic surgery and fashion.

For both the men and the women, fertility became the enemy of their lust for power. Instead of learning compassion, they learned more and more how to subdue their fertility. And when their fertility was fruitful, they killed the children they conceived.

But the poor men and women remembered the original gifts.

The men did not learn the arts of war. They worked with the women and became more compassionate. They gave thanks for their shared work, their shared fertility, and their shared compassion.

The women did not learn the arts of seduction. They worked with the men and became strong. They too gave thanks for their shared work, their shared fertility, and their shared compassion.

And the LORD said of them: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

There’s something about me that seems to bring out the dysfunctional in people. My theory is that because I tend to be very tolerant and understanding as well as prone to a certain amount of chaos, people simultaneously get their issues triggered and forget themselves with me. They accuse my clueless 6 year old of being an evil mastermind bent on making everyone around him squirm with discomfort. They tell me that I’m arrogant. They tell me that my life is being held hostage to an awful ghetto man who controls and oppresses me. They tell me that I’m a selfish person who spends all my time thinking about myself. They tell me that my life is too awful for them to witness. Or like my husband did earlier this week they tell me that a freak accident involving my purse being left on the roof of the car is proof of A REALLY BIG PROBLEM with the entire way I manage life.

For many years I nearly drove myself crazy taking these sorts of things seriously. I had bought into the idea that everyone could see me much more clearly than I see myself and would take the most outrageous, outlandish things people said to me very seriously. Until I finally came to the realization that for all my attempts to take these sorts of evaluations of me and my life seriously, none of them had ever held up to examination. Why? Certainly not because I’m so perfect! But I’ve always been far harder on myself than anyone imagines, so the odds that some big fault of mine had gone undetected by me lo these many years is pretty slim. Not only that, but giving so much credence to those who lobbed such ideas at me had a very negative effect on my life. Quite literally everything I’ve ever done that I came to regret had one of two roots: an emotional over-reaction on my part or trusting someone else’s opinion more than my own. I’m still wrestling with the emotional over reacting thing. But what to do with all these people who really believe, as I once did, that they can see me and my faults much more clearly than I can?

The easy answer is, “get rid of ‘em!” But what happens when you’re married to one of them? Or the child, sister, brother or parent of one of them? Or they are in your bible study or work with you or live with you? Well, you set boundaries, of course! But what happens when your attempts to do that are met with hostility, accusations that you’re unwilling to face reality or even that you’re being abusive? What do you do when you’ve tried listening, talking, explaining and the other person seems constitutionally incapable of understanding or respecting your perspective?

For quite some time I have generally gone with the default “get rid of ‘em” tactic. It’s been a healthy thing, mostly. I needed the mental space to learn to appreciate what is good about me without all the unhelpful editorializing. But the reality is that most people are dysfunctional. And like I said, I seem to have a knack for triggering that dysfunction. There must be some way to protect myself from these people who just don’t get it and want to fight with me about it without cutting myself off from family and friends. But I’ll admit, I don’t really know what that is. Ideas? Wisdom? Good advice? As long as it doesn’t start with “well, first you need to face the fact that THERE’S SOMETHING SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH YOU”, I’m all ears!

Or maybe the son set about making right what he had destroyed. Perhaps he threw himself into the family business in order to recover what had been lost. Perhaps he began cultivating virtues he had rejected up til then. Perhaps he was gracious and patient in the face of his brother’s anger. Perhaps he was solicitous towards his father, eager to relieve his fears and return the great grace that had been shown to him. Perhaps he became a servant to all, ready to accept insults and gossipy whispers from the neighbors without flinching, knowing he earned them. Perhaps he became a treasured member of his community for his grace, good behavior, care for those in need and hard-found wisdom.

It’s hard to guess what would have happened once the party was over. Maybe some combination of the good and the bad, just the way life usually is. But the story didn’t really end with the party. That was just the beginning, non?

You can look at your life as a large cone that becomes narrower the deeper you go. There are many doors in that cone that give you chances to leave the journey. But you have been closing these doors one after the other, making yourself go deeper and deeper into your center. You know that Jesus is waiting for you at the end, just as you know that he is guiding you as you move in that direction. Every time you close another door . . . you commit yourself to go deeper into your heart and thus deeper into the heart of God. ~ Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

I first came across this quote from Henri Nouwen years ago and have always thought that it was rather apt. There are so many ways that one can just walk away from the spiritual life. Or maybe not even walk away, but just find a door that you can’t bring yourself to close to hang out by. You could hang onto guilt or unforgiveness.  You could make choices based on what’s safe and comfortable.  You could decide that instead of an identity in Christ an identity as a parent or spouse or accountant or whatever is good enough. Or you could just decide that throwing yourself into the abyss is kind of a dumb way to live your life and go to seek your fortunes out in the world beyond that ever narrowing cone. But I didn’t. And now I’m in the deep dark part of the cone with no escape hatches in sight.

Early this year I said that I thought this year would be one of letting go. Which was kind of silly. I’m already really good at letting go. I’ve practiced it to near perfection over years and even decades. I deal with a problem, learn from it and then let it go. I let go like a champ. No, this is not the year of letting go. This is the year of limits. And that I am not so practiced at or comfortable with.

“Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it”. ~ Matthew 7:14

Up until now I’ve recognized limits and chosen to abide by them. I’ve failed at things and chosen to accept that it wasn’t the right thing at the right time. But the presumption was always that I could choose not to accept that limit. I could have chosen to break through failure, paid the price and pursued my goals to the point of success. Limits meant saying “I won’t”, “I don’t”, “I haven’t . . . yet.” But in the last 12 months I’ve had to add another phrase to my repertoire: “I can’t”. And now the “I can’t”s have piled up until I can hardly move. As I’m discovering, it’s one thing to practice being still. But it’s another thing entirely to not be able to move.

My van died. My dog bit the baby. We can’t afford the $45 surrender fee the shelter requires to take him back. My 12 year old flunked his online course because the computer crashed and ate his (not turned in) homework during the system restore. Now the school district is threatening not to pay for any more classes because it looks like he did nothing. I had to quit my DJ job because I can’t carry the equipment since I’ve been sick. I’ve been working on making a series of vlog posts for weeks. But each time something goes wrong; YouTube ate the file, I get interrupted, the microphone was off, I get interrupted, the video camera stopped recording part way through, I get interrupted, the picture is all jerky, I get interrupted, I can’t get new video capture software to install properly. (I swear, I’m just giving highlights from the last month. There’s much, much more of this joyousness.) On and on it goes. Day after day. Nothing completely catastrophic, but one thing after another blocking any way out.  I feel like I’m just being pinned down and there’s nothing I can do about it. Like a person stuck in a narrow passage while spelunking, all I can do is breathe and keep creeping forward.

He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light . . .He has walled me in so I cannot escape . . . Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer. He has barred my way with blocks of stone; he has made my path crooked . . I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. ~Lamentations 3:2,7,8-9,17

I’m not sure if it’s the stress or being sick almost continuously for 2 months (did you know that under certain circumstances you can pee out blood clots? I had previously been unaware of this fascinating possibility.) , but I honestly think I have brain damage. It’s taken 4 days to write this post so far.* My body doesn’t work. I can’t hear God at all. I can’t pray. I can tell that better things are coming, but frankly it just doesn’t make much difference at the moment.

All the old saints and mystics say that the greater the darkness, the closer to the heart of God you are. Even if that’s true and I haven’t spent my life on a fool’s errand or been cast into the outer darkness for swearing too much, I can’t imagine why I or anyone else was ever be foolish enough to try to come this way. As St. Teresa of Avila is purported to have said to God, “if this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few.”  I suppose it’s like labor; everyone knows it’s awful and yet we manage to convince ourselves that it’s worth going through.

More than once in the last month I’ve started a blog post in my head that included some version of the words: “If you are thinking of following God, don’t. It’s not worth it. He will lead you into misery and humiliation and abandon you there. Even if He finally brings you out of the awful places he takes you into, you’ll be too destroyed to give a crap.” I’ll become the anti-evangelist. Not that it would any good. There’s just something about being caught up by God. It’s like Munchausen’s Syndrome or something. Only God won’t have me rob a bank – that would mean giving me access to cash.

My soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning . . . I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him. To the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. ~ Lamentations 3:20-23,24-26

*OK, it took 5 days. Plus an extra day waiting for the neighbor whose internet we’re stealing to fix their modem. It was down for a while. They really need to take care of that. heehee

As I explained to Sophia and Michaela last night, there are several reasons that I won’t consider allowing the police to take my children’s fingerprints. First of all, there is just no reason to. The police and school see this as a safety precaution, but taking a kid’s fingerprints doesn’t protect them from any harm. There’s not one terrible event which could be prevented by having my kid’s handprint on file. Even if something really awful were to happen to her, fingerprints could only help police to make an identification. But even then, this would only help if she were still alive or her body had been found within a relatively short time of death before decay set in. And even if that were the case, other means of identification are available: pictures, DNA. So, the usefulness of having her fingerprints on file is pretty much nil.

Even more than that, I think that the whole notion that it is reasonable or responsible to plan for the sort of events where having quick access to her fingerprints is corrosive in and of itself. You would never know it from watching the news or observing many parents, but our kids are safer today than they have been in decades. Crime – including crimes against children - have dropped precipitously from their high points in the early 90s. Yet rather than celebrating the fact that we live in a time where our children are so safe, we live in fear. And we pass that fear on to our kids.

Kids don’t have access to crime statistics, but they are sharp enough to understand that if we are taking their fingerprints “just in case”, it’s because there is a real chance that they will be needed. And yes, terrible things do happen. But close to 95% of violence against children occurs at the hands of people they know – often in their own homes. The chances of any particular child being the victim of crime in any other context are vanishingly remote. To put this into perspective, more than three times as many people are struck by lightning each year in the USA than there are children kidnapped by strangers each year. To make plans for this sort of “just in case” event would be much like buying clothing designed to conduct electricity in the event of a lightning strike. It happens, but not so often that we prepare for it!

And this fear that we have about our kid’s safety isn’t harmless. We have a very real childhood obesity epidemic, but every parent worries that if they allow their child outside without a keeper neighbors will talk and CPS might even be called. My brothers and sisters and I used to wander all over town and the neighbors never thought it was a problem! Well, there was that one time my mom got a call telling her that I was sitting on my bike on the corner eating candy – a sure sign I wasn’t supposed to have candy and had probably stolen coins to buy it with. But even though I was statistically more likely to have been the victim of crime as a child back in the 80s than my kids are today, no one thought my mother was negligent or putting us in danger to let us walk to the park by ourselves. These days people sometimes call 911 to report a child sighted out and about without an adult keeping watch. This is not healthy for us as a society or for our kids.

I want my kids to grow up to be strong, confident people who can move through their world freely, not afraid of shadows and boogey-men because my fear kept them from being given the chance to learn basic competance. So, I am philosophically and morally opposed to behaving as if my children are in ever-present danger. And getting fingerprinted is just one little thing on top of a bunch of other things which all create a culture of fear and helplessness for our kids. I’ve also refused to allow their pictures to be kept on file at the police station for quick distribution in case they go missing. They’ll just have to make do with the ones from our phones that we take all the time. My kids are the only children I’ve ever seen exploring the cool dead tree out in the field by our house – a kid’s playground if ever there was one. And my advice to parents who worried about their kids and the pile of sticks the previous resident left in our backyard was always, “just don’t watch.” (No one ever got hurt although I did have to institute a rule that sticks for play couldn’t be taller than the person using it, thicker than their wrist or thinner than their pinky. But this was mostly for the sake of my poorly parented neighbor kids who thought it was funny to deliberately hurt people.) As far as I can tell, I’m about the only parent on my kid’s bus route that doesn’t walk them to the bus stop and back. (I was shocked one morning when the bus was late and I drove my girls in – at the end of every driveway that the bus stops at along the way parents were sitting in their cars with their kids! And this is a bus that takes everyone from K-12 to school – not just the elementary kids. And it was 30 degrees out – hardly dangerous weather her in Wisconsin!) I teach my kids that it’s OK to talk with people they don’t know, but that they can never go anywhere with anyone without talking with me first – even someone they know. Which is not only safe, but common courtesy. I even – gasp – allow my kids to sled without helmets.

I know, I’m a terrible mother. But I’d rather be a terrible mother with competent kids than a “good” mother whose kids never get to practice being independent or taking small risks. I do not want my kids living in fear or thinking that it is normal to arrange life out of fear of things that could, but almost certainly won’t happen. One of the best illustrations of how insane and counter-productive our collective fear for our children is comes from a letter published by Lenore Skenazy on her indispensable blog Free Range Kids:

I asked [a fireman] about the red reflective circles that we all used to have on our bedroom windows in the ’70s and ’80s — remember those? — to alert firefighters there might be children in those rooms. “Why don’t we have those anymore?” I asked.

He hemmed and hawed for a minute before he responded something to the effect that “society” anymore doesn’t really approve of those. “Society?” I was thinking. “What part of society could object to notifying firefighters where children sleep…?”

Aha. It sunk into my thick (Free-Range reinforced) skull: By having red stickers in kids’ bedroom windows, we would be advertising to all predators that a child lives in this house! Of course, there is no other way for a predator to know where a child lives. The chalk designs on the sidewalk, the bikes in the garage, never mind all the comings and goings of the family. None of those communicate that there are children as much as that red dot in the window. Why, predators would be lining up — or climbing in!

Now, given that more than 90% of child sexual abuse cases and more than 95% of child abduction cases involve someone the child knows — many of whom are family members — most predators not only know where the child lives, but also where she sleeps. The firefighter told me that those red dots were helpful back in the day, showing firefighters where to put their ladders to track down children as quickly as possible. But “society” has chosen to protect us from potential boogey men instead of fires.

This is the world we are creating by indulging in fear. When (fake) Dear Abby advises taking a picture of your child each morning just in case he or she goes missing that day. When we safety-proof playgrounds to the point that they are no longer fun to play on and our kids don’t know how to engage in gross motor activities safely. Or when we take fingerprints of our 5 year old children just in case . . .

The reality is that terrible things happen. Terrible things will always happen. It’s part of life. I’m not super-human. I’m not God. I can take reasonable precautions against predictable tragedies, but I will never be able to make my kids or myself completely safe. It’s not my job and trying to do so is itself quite predictably harmful.

Besides, I prefer to direct my paranoia towards more realistic targets. For example, the real reason the police want everyone’s fingerprints on file has nothing to do with child safety – that’s just an easy, guilt-laden cover. They know perfectly well that there’s pretty much no practical safety-related reason to fingerprint 5 year olds. The fact of the matter is that the most likely use of my kid’s fingerprints would be to catch her if she were to commit a crime in ten years. Or if she were present in a place where a crime was committed – perhaps not even when it was committed! Innocent people have been convicted on less. Or they may be used by an identity thief looking for a way to get through biometric security. Or even for an out-of-control government keeping an increasingly unruly populace under its thumb so that the rich can live in peace. Maybe it’s not a real threat today. But how about ten years from now? Twenty? God willing, she has the genes to still be kicking around in 80 or 90 years and there’s no way that I can guess what will be going on then. I mean, good heavens – there could be a Marxist Kenyan bent on destroying all that is good and holy in office by then – bwahahaha! But whatever happens, it won’t involve a set of fingerprints kept on file from when she was 5.

Reblogged from The Upside Down World: