Believer Beware: First-Person Dispatches From the Margins of Faith

.
"Please Don't Feed the Prophet" by Daniel S. Brenner

"I don't know what kind of person you are, but maybe you don't believe that God loves you any more than Barney the Purple Dinosaur loves you..."

Daniel's dispatch is a stream of consciousness rant on the seeming impossibility of making a connection with a loving God. He ends with this story;

"There was a child born whose mother did not give her milk. Nor did she give her love, nor think of her as a miracle as she lay in the cradle. A bitter woman, she was, a tormented woman, her mind had been warped by the selfishness of those around her and she saw her child only as a burden, a chain, an affliction.

Yet in spite of the mother's neglect, the child grew. For in her dreams each night an angel would come and feed her. First the angel fed her letters, all the letters of the languages of the earth. And these letters nourished the child.

And as she grew the angel began to feed her words. And this was good. She grew more and soon the words grew into poems, and the poems begat songs, and the songs begat stories upon stories.

Soon the child was grown up, and she walked the earth filled with the letters, words, poems, songs, and stories from the angel. And in small groups, people would gather to hear her. Some men wanted to hunt her down and kill her for her stories frightened them. Some women wanted to slit her throat from jealousy. Her stories spoke of the deep shame of her life, the silent pain, the loneliness. And when she spoke, those who heard her felt a nourishment they had never felt, a mending of all that had been shattered. She roamed from place to place and spoke in her quiet way, a cross between whispers and lullabies. Where is she now, this child fed from the letters of angels? ... She had disappeared. Wandered off deep inside your soul, calling out to your right now to join her. She's getting ready to tell you a story.



Peter

Believer Beware

I've always had a connection with Doubting Thomas. He's the sceptic among the believers and many of us can identify with that. Many of us hear a statement of belief and our response is "Yes, but...." I think Erik Hanson would understand that.

Eriks grew up in the Evangelical Covenant Church. But by the age of 22 he had developed an uneasy relationship with that group of believers. Other influences had been working on him. So when he found himself as a counselor at a camp designed to bring about a born again experience among teenagers, it was a most awkward situation.

Hanon writes,

"From Kierkegaard I knew that Truth is subjectivity, from Nietzsche that Christians were pop Platonists, and from Rene Girard that the New Testament revealed the scapegoat mechanism secretly present in all other myths. I knew Christianity, like life, was something far more complex and messy and hard and weird than you could explain to teens in a week. And I knew that it was condescending and wrong to make teens feel dysfunctional if they did not have a Jesus experience in just the way the CHIC had preordained for them."

Here's to the revolutionaries in the crowd, the protestors in the group, the divergers, those who ask the pointed question. You are walking alongside the One who wrestled hard with the tradition and found himself in the loyal opposition. Jesus loved the tradition but he sure did not see it the way the traditionalists did.


Peter

Believer Beware

To Pardon all our F***in' iniquities

Laurel Snyder grew up in a home where religion was somewhere between the opiate of the masses and a kettle of fish better left alone. As She did go to Hebrew school on Sundays but only to keep the grandparents off their case. After her parents' divorce, her mother started going to church. This caused Laurel much confusion, trying to sort out the often opposing messages between church and synagogue. She was never quite sure what was a bad word since it changed with the religious views of the family. In time, following religion classes in college and a host of other influences, Laurel began to shape a Judaism that fit her political interests and aesthetic.

And now she finds herself trying to navigate the Jewish season of awe, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Yom Kippur is the time to ask forgiveness of those we have harmed. During the Yom Kippur service, chests are thumped and a prayer is recited, called the Vidui. The prayer is an alphabetic recitation of the communal sins committed. Laurel calls it a string around the finger, a way to begin a new year by apologizing to others and ourselves (maybe even to God if we like) for our mistakes and missed chances. If you ask three times then the other person has to forgive you. if they don't, you are forgiven anyway. You get a do-over, if you bother to ask.

Some of the wisdom of an ancient path which Laurel affirms in her earthy style.

Peter