Author: Cherie Renae

A new, open theology is emerging,based on love and justice, on introspective faith and hands open to the world. Blogger Bryan Berghoef describes what he sees as “A New Convergence.” It’s worth a look!

I had a vision of a high, beautiful vault, and I realized I was seeing myself, iridescent white, with multi-color light dancing across the ceiling of my soul. Then I understood: I am all light; in me there is no darkness at all.

It’s always about the journey; there isn’t a destination. The further I go, the less I know, but the more I can imagine.

I am pro-life. Don’t get mad, don’t feel justified, please keep reading.

When moral issues arise, I try to side with life. Ideologically, I believe abortion, the death penalty, war and assisted suicide are all murder: the premeditated killing of another human. IN AN IDEAL WORLD, I would not support any of them.

The problem is, of course, that our world is a messy place, and choices are rarely as simple as good/bad. Usually, we’re taking a multiple-choice test, where the ‘right’ answer is as difficult to decipher as an SAT analogies exam. Sometimes we have several good choices. Sometimes, we must decide between two terrible choices.

This was driven home to me several years ago. A visiting theologian described his job with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America – to locate and safely return Lutheran missionaries, pastors and other workers who had been taken as political prisoners in hostile countries. He told us of his anguish when a political faction offered to return prisoners in exchange for arms. He said, “I knew those guns would be used to kill other humans. I also knew, if we did not supply them, they would obtain the arms elsewhere. I prayed all night. In the end, I decided that my mission was to obtain the safe release of our people. God help me, I gave the guerrillas their guns. I won’t know until I stand before the throne of God whether I made the right decision.”

What follows are my current thoughts about these hot topics. They have evolved over time, as all thought must. I believe it’s godly to remain open to new insight that may guide our opinions, and sin to shut our hearts from God’s nudges. My thoughts are sometimes contradictory, maybe even hypocritical. As the theologian said, I cannot truly know God’s opinion until I stand before Her.

In the case of assisted suicide: There are pain management strategies these days that can sustain quality of life for most people until natural demise, and I hate to think of the world being prematurely deprived of a beautiful soul. However, I think the decision should be between each person and their physician and loved ones. It is not mine (read: society) to decide nor judge. In fact, after seeing the slow demise of my mother-in-law to Alzheimer’s, I’ve made clear to my children and my husband that if such a terrible fate befalls me, that I do not want my life to be sustained. I’ve asked, in advance, for suicide assistance. This seems at odds with my beliefs – but I don’t believe that what she suffered for most of a decade qualified as life. A zombie is not a person, and I’m not convinced her soul still resided in that empty shell.

In the case of war: I’m against war. Period. What terrible delusion is the human race suffering, to think that lining up young people and asking them to kill each other is ANY solution for disagreement? Worse yet is the kill-from-afar technology that gets more sophisticated every year. No one wins, especially not the victor. War is failure. Having said that, if an army arose over the hill and threatened my loved ones, I would pick up a rifle and start shooting, no questions asked. I would die to defend my children, my family, my friends. What a contradiction!

In the case of the death penalty: State killing is the premeditated taking of another life. It is murder. It is not justice, it is revenge – but it does no good for the person thus avenged. They are still dead. A just society does not use murder as palliative care for survivors.

In a less sophisticated society, an argument might be made for permanently removing a member to protect society as a whole. If we were suddenly dumped on a desert island with our families and friends, and one of us became a serial murderer, we might need to consider rowing the murderer out and dumping them into the middle of the ocean to prevent further innocent death. We’d still be murderers, too, but it’s a ‘two bad choices’ scenario – there is no good solution.

But we don’t live in such a society. We have humane ways to remove those who would wreak havoc. Furthermore, we are called as Christians to care not only for victims, but also for the victimizer: to care just as much for their soul.  Jesus says:

“You have heard that it was said: You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. He makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and your sisters, what more are you doing? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore, just as your Heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so you must also be complete.” – Matthew 5:43-48

And finally, to the question of abortion. I looked back historically on abortion perspectives within the Jewish and Christian communities. There has never been a consensus. The Bible itself is almost moot on abortion, except for Numbers 5:11 – 28, where, if a man suspects his wife is pregnant through adultery, he can present her to the priest, who will have her drink an abortificant. There’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo about the results if she’s innocent or guilty, but the practical result is, she will abort. Note the woman has no choice in this – it’s all up to the man.

The church doesn’t agree about when the soul enters the fetus. If at conception, what about identical twins/triplets, etc? Does one body contain multiple souls? (Because the mitosis doesn’t occur immediately.) I see no scriptural basis, other than demon possession, for believing that one body can house multiple souls. If not until birth, then what about the unique personalities shown by each baby, from about the fifth month on? What about their responses to sound, to light? I think we have to admit that we don’t really know when a soul and a body unite.

For me, that doesn’t change the fact that abortion is murder – the premeditated taking of a human life. But I will not stand in judgment of others. We live in an imperfect world. For myself, I have drawn the line of vehement objection at viability. I’ve spent too many hours photographing 20 and 25 week preemies who did not survive birth, listening to the family sob hysterically in the background, to consider these tiny ones without souls. We read daily of the heroic efforts (and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent) to save the lives of little ones from about 22 weeks on. I cannot reconcile deliberately flushing what others try so hard to save, and mourn so deeply to lose.

In summary, I’ve pondered long over these questions, and will continue to do so. The answers aren’t easy, if there are answers at all. What I do know is that God loves us as the saint-sinners that we are. He loves the unborn child. He loves the mass murderer. He loves the arms dealers, the guerillas, and the poor peacemakers who make heart-wrenching decisions. He loves us all.

Tao thoughts:

Let go of false attachments to past pains. Most questions are not worth chasing. Let go and skip straight to acceptance. 

We spend so much time analyzing, analyzing, analyzing! We question our past, our present, our future, our relationships, our brokenness, our wholeness. We eat up our current moments mentally pursuing other moments. It is folly. Quit chasing, skip straight to acceptance.

Awen!

At 3 am on an early Sunday morn, one of our members made a forum comment that was so beautiful, I had to share.  Background: about a month ago, I posted an article about peace. You can read it here: Peace in Motion. We’ve been discussing it ever since. Here are Ryan’s thoughts:

Peace is that intake of breath before the sun breaks the horizon; it is the sigh as it melts below the waves. Peace is the fall of snow on an empty field; it is the patter of rain on the forest canopy. Peace is the slow buzz of bees on a warm sunny day and the silence of a starry night.

Peace is not easy to define or to find when you first look for it, but once you find it she will come when you ask. Once we find it, truly find it that first time, it lies forevermore inside of us waiting to be called forth. Like the ember banked in the hearth waiting to be brought forth into a warming fire when needed, so is peace when we carry it in our hearts.

We have a poet in our midst! Thank you, Ryan. Awen.

There’s an excellent quiz floating around Facebook. Called “See which Presidential Candidate you side with”, it asks a series of questions that you can answer with more than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and then it tells you how you align with the six major presidential candidates. The quiz is here, if you’re interested.

Turns out, I voted for the candidate with whom I was most closely aligned. Whew! Good news. Then I wondered, how many did the same, and how many found they were more closely aligned with another (probably third party) candidate, for whom they did not vote? So I asked people to take the quiz and report, yes or no, if they’d voted for their top candidate. Yes, an objective Facebook poll. 🙂

One person reported that they didn’t vote for their top candidate, but for their second. However, the two were only 2% apart. I replied that this was probably statistically insignificant, and that he was well inside his integrity zone.

Hey! As soon as that phrase hit the keys, it struck me as important for this election and for life in general. Are we voting, are we living, inside our integrity zone?

Let’s start with the voting question. In the US of A, we are stuck with a constitutional two-party system. This makes it nigh-on impossible for candidates who espouse a third viewpoint to be heard, much less elected. That means many people will not vote for a third-party candidate even if they align with them politically, for fear of ‘throwing their vote away’. Now, if there’s a major party candidate whose perspective is also closely aligned with one’s own, that’s not a problem. We are able to vote for that candidate without compromising our integrity.

But what about the person who took the quiz above and noted that he will still vote for the majority party candidate, even though that candidate scored ten percentage points lower than his first choice? Ten points is statistically significant, and surely takes him out of his integrity zone. He said he voted the way he did to ensure that his last choice candidate (the OTHER major party candidate) was NOT elected. You can make the case that he was still voting with integrity.

More commonly, though, people vote for someone they don’t really like in order to be on the winning team. No one wants to back a loser. The problem is, sometimes those third-party candidates would get elected if everyone voted within their integrity zone instead of worrying about whether or not their vote will ‘count’. This includes the person in the paragraph above.

Politics is one thing, but what about our lives? Why do we make choices that are outside of our integrity zone? It seems to me that the reasons are similar to our voting choices. We take the wrong job, because it’s the safe thing to do. We marry the wrong person, because it looks better than the third-party – oops, wheel – alternative, which is to be single. But we wind up stuck with a life that works no better than our current legislature, that bears no resemblance to our opinions or our hearts.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that we vote and live only within our integrity zone. If we do, we win no matter who is elected. Choose well!

Is there a universal consciousness? Is the soul real? Some scientists think so. Morgan Freeman narrates an interesting series of 2 minute snippets that describe scientific explorations of the soul.

To summarize: In 1996, renowned physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist/professor Stuart Hameroff proposed a theory that quantum manipulations in microtubules, which are contained in neurons of our brains, may be responsible for consciousness – the part of ourselves that we call our soul. Furthermore, this process may continue beyond the death and disintegration of our bodies.

Watch it for yourself here. And let me  know your thoughts…

Peace isn’t the cessation of adverse circumstance. It’s centeredness in the midst of life’s Coriolis swirl. It’s peeling off the grasping tentacles that try to sucker our hearts and our souls, then donning under-armor so negative has no hold.

Peace isn’t motionless tranquility, for if we don’t engage our spiritual, emotional and physical muscles, we’re taken where we don’t wish to go. Instead, peace is right action; it’s balance and counter-balance.

Stasis isn’t peace, though we may occasionally stop to hear our center. The true test of peace is motion.

In meditation today, Spirit spoke:

You are created of stardust, the stuff of a billion suns. You, too, have sufficient mass, so let the sparks ignite! Let those tiny explosions illuminate the cosmos. Don’t hide your brillance from yourself or others. It’s sin, not virtue, to turn from the path your shining reveals.

Dare to think yourself crazy. Dare to let others think the same. Follow those passions, those intuitions, those dreams. Shine!

PS: We ARE stardust! Check out this science book, published last month!  Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars