Seeing Ourselves in Myths It’s hard to know how an ancient culture viewed its myths. There are indications that the Greeks believed in their gods as much as did any group of people. They worshiped them and sacrificed to them because they hoped these powerful beings might bless them and their loved ones. The stories told about these gods, however, were something else. In Christianity, Biblical literalism is a recent phenomenon, arising in Europe and America in the 18th century, according to the French writer, Dennis Diderot, [1] and the 19th and 20th centuries, according to Marcus Borg. [2] Ancient Hebrews and first-century Christians understood that their religious stories were…
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The New Year and Starting Where We Are
Making the Best of the New Year It’s the new year, and many of us are making resolutions. There’s a lot online about how to best stick with whatever goal you’ve set for yourself this year, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to improve oneself. The paradox is, however, that’s it often easier to change if, instead of pushing ahead with gritted teeth and a relentless determination, if we do so with acceptance and gentleness. Pema Chödrön talks about this in her book Start Where You Are. She suggests we look deeply at who we are and accept ourselves without judgment. Then we can move forward. If we refuse to…
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Seeing But Not Perceiving
Never Perceiving In the kingdom of God, the sick receive healing, the poor have enough to eat, and the weak are powerful. Yet no matter how much Jesus preaches about this kingdom, the disciples don’t get it. They want to know if they’ll sit at his right hand in heaven. They want glory and power. But Jesus called them to serve. In the Gospel of Mark, he must repeatedly admonish them to stop thinking about their own desires, stop seeking to be served, and strive instead to become better servants. As Geert Van Oyen points out in his analysis of the gospel, the acolytes want to fulfill “their own interests”…
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The Journey of Forgiveness
Revenge as a Gift of Evolution It’s all about the stories we tell. After we have been attacked or abused, betrayed or exploited, we can keep our anger alive by rehearsing the offense. We might not be able to control our initial burst of emotion, but we can choose to feed it. By proclaiming our innocence and condemning the other person, we can cling to our resentment for a long time. We can successfully keep forgiveness at bay. While it’s probably better for us physiologically to soothe our anger, there are times we might want to hold onto it. If we’re trying to get away from an abusive relationship, for…
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Racism, Sin, and Love
Original Sin? Slavery has been called America’s “original sin.” Barrett Holmes Pitner used the phrase in his article, “US Must Confront Its Original Sin and Move Forward,” published by the BBC. The University of California, Davis, offers a class called “Slavery: America’s Original Sin,” and the same words make up the title of a book by Jim Willis, America’s Original Sin. Barak Obama used the term in his Race Speech in March 2008, and Paul Krugman used it in a 2020 opinion column. These are just a few examples. According to John Patrick Leary, the phrase is an unfortunate one. He explains that we can’t atone for an original sin.…
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Jonah and A Message for Our Time
A Call to Compassion Once upon a time, there lived a prophet named Jonah. He was a real person who lived sometime around 800 BCE, but the story in the Bible that contains his name wasn’t written down until about four centuries later, and it hardly represents his life accurately. Indeed, it is a satirical tale, but it offers us a serious message. Jonah’s name means “dove.” Since the dove symbolizes Israel, we can assume that Jonah symbolizes her, as well. He was also the son of Amittai, whose own name meant “faithfulness,” but Jonah was far from faithful. When God told him to go prophesy to Nineveh, he ran…
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Shame and Self-Forgiveness
Toxic Shame I met with her many times. Being chronically ill, she ended up in the hospital often. Regardless of what we started talking about – her health, her grandchildren, her attempts to find a place where she could be at home – we always ended up talking about shame. For most of her life, people who claimed to loved her behaved as if they hated her. They told her she was stupid, ugly, worthless, and hopeless. They beat her, they sabotaged her efforts to achieve, they denied her the right of personhood. According to them, she couldn’t do anything right. Certainly she couldn’t “be” right. Her burden of shame…
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Prayer, Power, and Love — Martin Luther King, Jr.
History as Story I’ve written before about how our stories create us, how the memories we hold make us who we are. [1] This is true for us as individuals and as a society. Now, as we in the United States prepare to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday, we explore this topic again, because how we tell the story of this man’s life and ministry affects how we either carry on, or obstruct, the work he did. Perhaps King’s story doesn’t seem complicated enough for multiple interpretations. After all, he led a Civil Rights movement, he believed in beloved community, and he said we shouldn’t…
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Free Will and Microbes Among Us
Not Captains of Our Souls The more we learn about the creatures who inhabit this planet with us, the more obvious it seems that, regardless of what William Ernst Henley believed, we are not the captain of our souls, nor can we master our fate. [1] Yes, to some degree we can choose how to respond to adversity, and this is really what his poem is about. Written when he lay ill with tuberculosis and feared he might lose a foot, which was especially worrisome because he’d already had one leg cut off when he was sixteen, Henley’s poem honors his courage and his “unconquerable soul.” His words have inspired…
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No Forgiveness In Buddhism
In Buddhism, There Is No Forgiveness A few months ago, I attended a webinar in which the presenter stated that, in Buddhism, there is no forgiveness. This was not an idea I’d heard before. Because the presenter did not explain what she meant by this, I tried to guess. Could it be that if we dwell in the present moment, the past is gone, so forgiveness is unimportant? I thought of the story of the two monks who were walking along a road. They came to a river. There stood a woman, dressed in finery, looking uncertainly at the rushing water. She asked the monks to carry her across. The…