Dec '00 / Jan 2001
A
Gift Given, A Gift Received: Water
to Iraq
By Edilith Eckart
Election Analysis Progressive
Directions?
By Bill Thomson
Modernizing Our Electoral Rules
&
Practices
By Rob Richie
Democracy 101
By Blair Bobier
Clean Money: Campaign Finance
Reform
By John Moyers
Book Review: The Cultural Creatives
Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth
Anderson Reviewed by
Peter Montague
Remembrance: Robert Theobald
By Bob Stilger
Transforming Our Dreaming
By José Stevens
Democracy and the Airwaves
By Suzi Aufderheide
StarLink: More Bad News for Biotech
by Ronnie Cummins
The US Is Warned "Wake Up
To Global Warming Threat"
By Environmental News Service
U.S. Position Threatens to
Derail Climate Change Negotiations
By Cat Lazaroff
Martin Luther King, Jr: Global and
Social Shaman
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
Sexual Union, Inside and Out
By Peter Moore
A Pagan Speak to Jesus
By John Darling
Cosmic Calendar
By Salina Rain
A
Pagan Speaks to Jesus
By John Darling
I just saw a button that said, "I love Jesus. It's his fan club I can't
stand." I laughed. Must be true. How often in life I've tried to imagine
what this pervasive, persistent deity-man was trying to say and teach. And
how different, how nearly opposite is the image and history of his followers,
especially the enthused ones.
Ask anyone what Jesus was trying to teach and they'll likely say: Well, he
was trying to teach you to really open your heart to love, to love your neighbor
and not resist evil, sort of like Gandhi, to forgive those who've hurt you
and not to judge others and also to just stop carrying around a load of guilt
about past bad stuff you did and just let it go and start over today, as if
it were the first day and to recognize that he and God or whoever you call
it isn't mean and harsh. They love us. And if you can do all that, it makes
a great life.
I think that's the mythos of Jesus. That's how most people see the message
and the man. Or the god, if you will. That's why so many people have come
into the religion, especially in the cultures with poverty and oppression.
It's a message of relief, of setting down the heavy load, of having another
shot at inventing yourself as a good person who loves and is loved.
It's about love.
That's all it's about.
It's a profound and beautiful message. I was raised in the born-once Protestant
tradition and tried to go there as an adult. Couldn't. It was the fan club.
The bad music didn't help either. I went on to study the ancient religions
and to explore the indigenous, new age, Goddess and earth religions and found
them a lot more relevant and truthful for me.
But these spiritual ways didn't teach that unique sense of grace and fire
that Jesus did-that personal and soul-transforming love. Sometimes, I find
myself just sitting with him and feeling what an outrageous being he was to
stand up to the Romans and Jews and say: Hey, you're off track-it's about
love. All the scripture and temples and yammering of phrases and the sad looks
when you're fasting and the grandiose rituals and tithing and, worse than
nothing at all, the violence and hatred in the name of religion-all these
don't mean anything. Nothing. These are just forms. Things. And the proof
is the endless killing over religious differences in the "holy land."
All that matters is love.
When I study the ancient world, which is a lot, I am amazed at how radical
was this new preacher in his milieu. He transcended everything, all the genders
of gods and goddesses, their rivalries, violence and affairs, all the futile
and hopeless poverty, tyranny, conquest, and disease in life-and he showed
you how to carry a piece of heaven right here in your heart.
I think he wasn't a god, but I think he became one by stepping across that
line and giving all to love. And to him, love was God and vice-versa. We are
the sons and daughters of that. To do this, he had to conquer fear. In conquering
fear, he learned that it was love that made his soul immortal. Then there
could be no death.
I think when he said he was the son of God, he meant we are the sons of god
and he also meant daughters, but that didn't get taken down. He said the kingdom
of God is at hand. I think he meant that divine love and heaven and all that
is at hand now and not at some end-of-the-world judgment day. And, if God
is love, then "thou shalt have no other gods before me" becomes:
Put love ahead of everything.
I've puzzled long about the fan club. I've asked him how I might find a way
to forgive them. And how I might lose my fear and judgments of them for the
Inquisitions, infidel-bashings, clinic attacks, for the witch-burnings, fear-mongering,
hellfire preaching, for the Crusades, the pogroms, the gay-hounding, the died-for-our
sins guilt-tripping, the empire-building, the destruction of indigenous religions
and the general demonizing of sexuality and dismissing of nature in favor
of the next world.
These are all tools of socio-political domination, not of spirit. We often
see that slogan, WWJD-What would Jesus do? What he would do, if he were here
seeing all these things done in his name, is barf on his sandals.
Organized religion beckons followers to several all-too-human cravings-the need to belong, the need to flee our freedom and individuality by submerging in groupthink, the need to find security in reducing all life to One Way and that most alluring and misguided need to be right, which becomes righteousness and worse- claiming to speak in the name of God.
I pray they do
not come with torches and pitchforks for me, an iconoclast. I pray they do
not gain the presidency or sweep over the world, as they have so often, like
avenging angels. I'm not one of them. I feel afraid of them. Holy trance is
fine, but it's not love.
And so, I found myself talking to Jesus. I found that he answers. I found
all deities answer. They answer with a mute power that shifts understanding
and makes things start happening in unexpected ways. For the better.
His answer to me was suffering. It's kind of like him, isn't it? Something
happened in my life that slammed me into a wall and woke me up and made me
look at everything as someone who had answers for nothing. That might be a
definition of humility. The wound. The ego scrambling as it denies, gets angry,
bargains, then accepts. The stopping of the mind. The opening of the heart.
And, without understanding why, I wept.
It goes on in little things. I was about to honk at an "idiot" in
traffic and I suddenly found myself saying, my god what am I doing? I saw
myself. This rudeness of me is just a sliver of the human cruelty in the world
but it's here, right inside me, doing its meanness. Instead, I just waved.
I tried to look in the other driver's eyes. I found myself smiling.
So, on we go.
I'm taking Jesus back from the fan club. They hijacked him, but they don't
own him. He's what he says he is: A messenger of love, who, when he died,
discovered the way to make all guilt and shame go away. He held the light
up for us to see how the puzzle was solved. He did it as we have to do it.
He did it with love.
John Darling, M.S. is a writer, counselor, philosopher and mystic living
in Ecotopia.
