The other night, after a very long
week of politicking for the continuation of his advocacy organization’s money
stream, he posted this on Facebook:
Super long
day, with more to come tomorrow. Time to curl up with some jazz, some red wine,
my Bible, and my bed.
It’s times like these that I get
greater insight into Peter being a real jackass as his best friend was dying on
the Cross and Moses using his disability to try to weasel out of being a
spokesperson for the Hebrews. It’s true that many, if not most, of Spirit’s
best messengers have been deeply flawed. But in my universe the Bible wasn’t
exactly the best compliment to wine (unless Jesus was pouring) and jazz just
may have been Satan’s favorite music because it made you want to writhe in very
unholy ways.
A very, very long time ago I
gave up being a Christian. I, like Ghandi, basically don’t like Christianity very
much because it so often is not much like its Christ. I have been truly averse
to naming myself Christian even though I had been a good Catholic girl until I
discovered serious sin my freshman year of college. I was averse for all the
right reasons – the Inquisition, the Crusades, Manifest Destiny….my litany of
Christian crimes stretched across my progressive-minded playbook. But I have
never been able to ignore the pull of Spirit. So what was I to do?
I originally learned about
Taoism from my father. If my father was
anything, he was a Taoist. We talked about that a bit when I was in college and
I started reading Lao Tse and the Tao Te Ching (the Way to Virtue). As I read,
I felt like I was falling into a warm familiar stream and I realized that this
was a way of being that had meaning – maybe not to everyone but certainly to my
father – and to me.
Later, while I was caring for
him as he lay dying, my father and I had long conversations about why he kept
the Way and basically tossed the Christian God out on His ear. In these
discussions, I realized that I, like him, just could not stand the hypocrisy of
a religion that evangelized the separation of those who did not believe exactly
what the Religion of the month wanted their believers to believe. The litmus
test for heaven was not in being a good, kind and compassionate soul
but one that would stand up in front of one’s peers to proclaim that Jesus was
his or her personal savior. Hogwash. What was the point of Jesus’ time of earth
if it wasn’t to proclaim to all that such exclusivity was completely misguided
and that we are all cells of the same tree?
Personally, I think Jesus
really got the whole Taoism thing. That’s how I cope with my son becoming an
advocate for Jesus’ way of thinking. Not all of us are going to respond to
something as ambiguous as The Way. It is very personal and offers very little
concrete guidance for navigating sin in the modern world. Of course, it doesn’t
really talk about sin at all – just being in the river of the Way… or not. The
not is one’s own business since not being with the Way means nothing more than
a diversion. It’s basically impossible to be hypocritical as a Taoist. Taoism
offers a path (call it the River we all long to be a drop of) but if
you decide you don’t want to get familiar with the Way, that’s okay. We all get
there on our own time. It’s kind of hard to rebel against something that
teaches rebellion is just one step on the path. And Taoists are patient sons of
a gun.
So back to the juxtaposition of
wine and the Bible. Lots of reference to wine in the Bible. So maybe wine and
the Bible go together like Huckleberry and Finn and I am just letting the
memory of the sour smell of the Knights of Columbus Hall on a Saturday morning
cloud my thoughts about whether these two go hand-in-hand. I get that wine is
symbolic of Christ’s blood spilled on the Cross for us but then I don’t relate
to that either. I think Christ didn’t die FOR our sins but BECAUSE of them. He
didn’t sacrifice himself for us; we sacrificed him because we were and continue
to be naughty and haughty children who resist the very idea that we are all part
of a cosmological ONE. It’s just too damn hard to love the unlovable. To invite
the ‘other’ into our home and our hearts.
But I am beginning to realize
that my son wants to live Christianity the way Christ lived it. That’s pretty
Wayish to me. So we continue to be the Taoist and the Christian, finding ways
in which our theologies coincide and sharing the stories of the Bible
and hopefully someday he will want to know the beautiful language of the Tao Te
Ching. I continue to acknowledge my role in introducing him to the very
religion I eschewed as a college student but ultimately relied upon to help my
son maneuver through this often difficult, out of sync world. Ultimately,
perhaps it was the Way that led me to the uber progressive Methodist church
that provided a safe place for a wild and weird kid to learn about Christ’s
mandate to love. After all, all things are possible with the Way.
