Such are the joys of a shared spiritual journey.
A spiritual journey, whether one knows they have one or not, is a characteristic that defines humanity. And to share in that journey with another, is to share a sacred bond of intimacy and love.
As such, Nenad and I relish in this experience. Our backgrounds are so different . . . and that is part of what makes this so fulfilling for each of us.
He being reared in an Eastern European Communist society. Not experiencing, or being shackled with the paradigm of fundamental, literal, scriptural doctrine or dogma as a life-controlling religious force. The Sacraments, the ritual, the high-holy mystique of the form of the Roman Catholic liturgy made up his formative religious experience. The Bible . . . simply a collection of the experiences of an ancient peoples. His formal training as a historian of the ancient world. . . it frames his perspective.
From my earliest recollections, the Bible was taught to me as a literal, inerrant narrative with a purpose-driven message. A literal, short-history paradigm of the world. My very being the result of a special creation by and for a personal God. That I must be redeemed by blood sacrifice to fulfill this world's destiny, to be made new and whole again. That I am but a bit-player in a conflict-of-the-ages scenario between a god and a satan. That my salvation depends on my choice of allegiance. That my belief and acceptance in the literal words of the "Bible" is the first prerequisite for my salvation. But being gay, it is all a moot point, for I am in a sinful condition that not even a god can forgive.
In a sense, we are both becoming liberated from our respective pasts.
Our discussions over the past year or so have lead us to this, a shared experience. For each of us, to read the Bible again (for we each have read it before, several times), but this time, "for the first time," with a new perspective. By accident, we found "The Queer Bible Commentary." We each have read from contemporary scholars, expositors, pontificators . . . how Christianity must change or die. What rigorous scholarship into the history, anthropology, archeology, geology, and theology of things ancient and modern with Mesopotamian cultures and religions tells us. What the centuries of Jewish Midrash help us to understand. What the sorry history of mankind becomes when things are done in the name of religion. We have discovered that the QBC is providing to us, a framework that puts the "w" questions into a context that makes such rational sense to each of us. The who, what, when, where, and why.
From Nenad's post to me last night, a comment on the perceived differences between religious "conservatism" and "liberalism."
Then there is another problem with liberalism: it keeps seeing itself in reference to conservatism. Conservatism is the standard, with everything else gaining its identity only in relation to it. Everything gets labeled according to its gold standard. So even when one feels firmly rooted in liberalism, it's usually with the awareness of what we have been liberated from. There's more of that fear of 'otherness' that you wrote about. But it all sounds quite co-dependent to me. The need to compare or debate, to look over your shoulder, to seek validation from 'the other side'. Which is why I love the QBC so much. These authors couldn't care less what the other side may think about their theology. They are not in it for the debate or some sort of intellectual competition with their conservative colleagues. They are not interested in wrestling with the religious right, as that would only resuscitate it and give it more power and significance. And that is the best revenge of all. Just let the old ways of thinking fall into oblivion. At the same time, that is not the Old Testament way of doing things. Writers of the Hebrew Bible could leave their former Canaanite ways, but they clearly couldn't leave them alone. It's all about the engagement and wrestling with the past, with much gusto and bravado. It really is two completely opposite attitudes toward life.
And so we each have found ourselves on this shared journey.
We find ourselves in a great museum. Filled with exhibits. Dioramas. Placards. Living history. Things to touch, to feel, to see, to smell, to taste. A docent that we dote. With all of its warts and scars and deformities and incongruities and vulgarities and violence and poetry and literature and wisdom and redeeming themes. Yes, we find ourselves in the NSRV version of the HarperCollins Study Bible.
We find ourselves in the hushed reading room of a library. The ambience of scholarship, of stateliness, of old polished wood, of the smell of antiquity. We catch the leaping letters of the learned from their pliable pages of a-platitudinous perception. We find writers wrestling with the constraints of the past, with the liberations of the future. We find diversity. We find newness. We find hope. We find liberation.
We find ourselves in a great national park. We saunter, together, far from the beaten path. We found a precipice. Fearfully, yet with an adrenalin rush of risk and adventure, we crawl on our hands and knees to peer over the edge. And the vista is exhilarating. An awesome new horizon.
But we are not very far into this journey.
We have only gotten to a point where an ancient people have failed miserably in claiming a land they believed was promised to them. [The end of the Book of Judges.] And there are hints as to the who, the where, the when, and most importantly, the why.
What epiphanies the QBC has yet for us, what new precipices we will find on our journey, we don't yet know.
But a theme of sorts has emerged to this point.
The Hebrew Bible is the self-written justification of a people with a purpose-driven history.
The separation between them, and "the other."
It started with their understanding of beginning. A story of separation. Light from darkness. Form from void. It eventually continued with a rigorous codification of holiness and cleanliness precepts to enforce the separation of the holy from the unholy, of the clean from the unclean. Of the "non-other" from "the other." The "other " being a the culmination of a driving sense of both xenophobia and disgust of those at the bottom of the "penetration-based" culture.
A story fused in the Mesopotamian agrarian economy of fertility.
To plant seed in one's property. Be it field or womb. And the hierarchy of ownership and penetration.
Where the penetrator is dominate over the penetrated.
And the stories of sex and vulgarities and power and control. And those few stories when women spoke, took command, and shattered the penetrator's paradigm of dominance.
The incidents of humiliating an "other" male with penetration. Nothing gay about it. Sheer domination of power and control over something, someone, considered as "the other."
And these stories, especially in the Hebrew Books of Genesis, Numbers, Joshua and Judges are horrific in violence, abusive and in-humane sex, vulgarity. The stories of genocide, mass-murder, extinction of whole tribes of peoples, involving tens of thousands of victims, they go on and on. Exhibit after exhibit in that museum that Nenad and I are immersed within.
And we wonder. Why!
Why these stories?
What is their "redeeming" value about them?
It was Nenad who suggested to me, as an acute observer of American culture, the why.
Just look at our American culture.
Our relishing of the Wild West Tales. The shoot-em' up cowboy-Indian adventures. The settlers versus "the other." The intrigue of massacre, killing, sex, violence. The excitement. The glorification. The embellishment. The conquest. The settlement. The domination.
Look at the American history of immigration. The new-comer "other" versus the all-ready here. The violence, distrust, hatred, discrimination.
Our fascination with Star Wars. Lord of the Rings. War of the Worlds.
Our addiction to CSI, The Sopranos, Dallas, and uncounted movies of the exploits of illicit sex, drama and action.
The telling and retelling of myth and legend and folklore until reality, revisionist history, and sheer fantasy are blurred beyond recognition and/or redemption.
Our perceptions, on our journey with the QBC so far, is that ancient Israel was no different from us. As the post-exile (the return of exiled Jews from their seventy-year captivity in Babylon) Jews determined to never, ever, let that breach of "other" from their "non-other" identity be the cause for them to be corporately punished again, they collected, edited, redacted, literally "stitched the scrolls together," in telling these embellished myths, legends, folk-tales and stories. Stories to emphatically differentiate their separation from "the other." To explain a purpose-driven identity and history.
We have and do the same with our "history."
As these stories were told and re-told by ancient Jews, there was, as Nenad calls it, "a sense of gusto and bravado."
Ergo . . . my depiction of a goat-herder and his participation within his contemporary society in re-telling, with gusto and bravado, his glorification of his cultural past. A visceral reaction, on my part, to a sense of culture, both for the ancient Israel peoples, and my own today, that I want to be liberated from.
Such are the joys of a shared spiritual journey.
A journey that has opened a vast and new horizon to each of us.
As Nenad suggested to me a while back, one of the lessons to be learned, is what we do with these stories. As a culture. As individuals.
Whereas fundamental Christianity has taken these myths and legends and stories, sometimes told with gusto and bravado, and codified them into a literal religious dogma that must be worshiped as an idol in and of itself, we do not need to do that. We must not do that. Anymore than we do not worship the stories of the Wild West, anymore than we do not make Lord of the Rings our scripture, anymore than we do not believe and rely on Star Wars for our authentic anthropological history. Anymore than we do not use CSI as our moral compass. Anymore than we do not look to the old series of Dallas as an exemplifier of righteous living.
Anymore than we should not look to a woman, pounding a tent-peg through a man's temple. Anymore than looking at men who rape a foreign man's wife to humiliate the husband. Anymore than we look at the maniacs at Sodom and Gomorrah who wanted to humiliate the strangers within their gate simply because it was their "right" to do so. Anymore than spies using the services of a prostitute and violating the separation of "other" from their "non-other." Anymore than cajoling a village of men into getting circumcised so they can marry their daughters, and then, in their incapacitation, murder all of them. Anymore than cheering on an Army in the massacring of tens of thousands of innocent women and children because they are "other."
To take these "vulgar, redemption-less" stories of the Hebrew Bible, to commission them as an inerrant scripture, to use them in the context of the Biblical key-text "Go, and do thou likewise," is to profane the very essence of spirituality.
And quite likely, those Hebrew Bible stories are as factual as the plots of CSI, Dallas, Star Wars and countless action-packed DVD's of drama, sex, violence and excitement.
Nenad, my personal thanksgiving to you. I have told you this before. For your suggesting we share this journey together. For your sharing of a perspective that is so liberating to me. And yes . . . for being my "instigator!" Enough so to get me into horrendous trouble in retelling a story from one of those little museum dioramas we looked at together, from those leapin' words of learnin' in that library, for egging me on to the edge of the precipice . . . but not shoving me over!! Sort of!! LOL You know I love you for it.
For a spiritual journey, whether one knows they have one or not, is a characteristic that defines humanity.
It is so good to be human.
The Refectory Manager
As such, Nenad and I relish in this experience. Our backgrounds are so different . . . and that is part of what makes this so fulfilling for each of us.
He being reared in an Eastern European Communist society. Not experiencing, or being shackled with the paradigm of fundamental, literal, scriptural doctrine or dogma as a life-controlling religious force. The Sacraments, the ritual, the high-holy mystique of the form of the Roman Catholic liturgy made up his formative religious experience. The Bible . . . simply a collection of the experiences of an ancient peoples. His formal training as a historian of the ancient world. . . it frames his perspective.
From my earliest recollections, the Bible was taught to me as a literal, inerrant narrative with a purpose-driven message. A literal, short-history paradigm of the world. My very being the result of a special creation by and for a personal God. That I must be redeemed by blood sacrifice to fulfill this world's destiny, to be made new and whole again. That I am but a bit-player in a conflict-of-the-ages scenario between a god and a satan. That my salvation depends on my choice of allegiance. That my belief and acceptance in the literal words of the "Bible" is the first prerequisite for my salvation. But being gay, it is all a moot point, for I am in a sinful condition that not even a god can forgive.
In a sense, we are both becoming liberated from our respective pasts.
Our discussions over the past year or so have lead us to this, a shared experience. For each of us, to read the Bible again (for we each have read it before, several times), but this time, "for the first time," with a new perspective. By accident, we found "The Queer Bible Commentary." We each have read from contemporary scholars, expositors, pontificators . . . how Christianity must change or die. What rigorous scholarship into the history, anthropology, archeology, geology, and theology of things ancient and modern with Mesopotamian cultures and religions tells us. What the centuries of Jewish Midrash help us to understand. What the sorry history of mankind becomes when things are done in the name of religion. We have discovered that the QBC is providing to us, a framework that puts the "w" questions into a context that makes such rational sense to each of us. The who, what, when, where, and why.
From Nenad's post to me last night, a comment on the perceived differences between religious "conservatism" and "liberalism."
Then there is another problem with liberalism: it keeps seeing itself in reference to conservatism. Conservatism is the standard, with everything else gaining its identity only in relation to it. Everything gets labeled according to its gold standard. So even when one feels firmly rooted in liberalism, it's usually with the awareness of what we have been liberated from. There's more of that fear of 'otherness' that you wrote about. But it all sounds quite co-dependent to me. The need to compare or debate, to look over your shoulder, to seek validation from 'the other side'. Which is why I love the QBC so much. These authors couldn't care less what the other side may think about their theology. They are not in it for the debate or some sort of intellectual competition with their conservative colleagues. They are not interested in wrestling with the religious right, as that would only resuscitate it and give it more power and significance. And that is the best revenge of all. Just let the old ways of thinking fall into oblivion. At the same time, that is not the Old Testament way of doing things. Writers of the Hebrew Bible could leave their former Canaanite ways, but they clearly couldn't leave them alone. It's all about the engagement and wrestling with the past, with much gusto and bravado. It really is two completely opposite attitudes toward life.
And so we each have found ourselves on this shared journey.
We find ourselves in a great museum. Filled with exhibits. Dioramas. Placards. Living history. Things to touch, to feel, to see, to smell, to taste. A docent that we dote. With all of its warts and scars and deformities and incongruities and vulgarities and violence and poetry and literature and wisdom and redeeming themes. Yes, we find ourselves in the NSRV version of the HarperCollins Study Bible.
We find ourselves in the hushed reading room of a library. The ambience of scholarship, of stateliness, of old polished wood, of the smell of antiquity. We catch the leaping letters of the learned from their pliable pages of a-platitudinous perception. We find writers wrestling with the constraints of the past, with the liberations of the future. We find diversity. We find newness. We find hope. We find liberation.
We find ourselves in a great national park. We saunter, together, far from the beaten path. We found a precipice. Fearfully, yet with an adrenalin rush of risk and adventure, we crawl on our hands and knees to peer over the edge. And the vista is exhilarating. An awesome new horizon.
But we are not very far into this journey.
We have only gotten to a point where an ancient people have failed miserably in claiming a land they believed was promised to them. [The end of the Book of Judges.] And there are hints as to the who, the where, the when, and most importantly, the why.
What epiphanies the QBC has yet for us, what new precipices we will find on our journey, we don't yet know.
But a theme of sorts has emerged to this point.
The Hebrew Bible is the self-written justification of a people with a purpose-driven history.
The separation between them, and "the other."
It started with their understanding of beginning. A story of separation. Light from darkness. Form from void. It eventually continued with a rigorous codification of holiness and cleanliness precepts to enforce the separation of the holy from the unholy, of the clean from the unclean. Of the "non-other" from "the other." The "other " being a the culmination of a driving sense of both xenophobia and disgust of those at the bottom of the "penetration-based" culture.
A story fused in the Mesopotamian agrarian economy of fertility.
To plant seed in one's property. Be it field or womb. And the hierarchy of ownership and penetration.
Where the penetrator is dominate over the penetrated.
And the stories of sex and vulgarities and power and control. And those few stories when women spoke, took command, and shattered the penetrator's paradigm of dominance.
The incidents of humiliating an "other" male with penetration. Nothing gay about it. Sheer domination of power and control over something, someone, considered as "the other."
And these stories, especially in the Hebrew Books of Genesis, Numbers, Joshua and Judges are horrific in violence, abusive and in-humane sex, vulgarity. The stories of genocide, mass-murder, extinction of whole tribes of peoples, involving tens of thousands of victims, they go on and on. Exhibit after exhibit in that museum that Nenad and I are immersed within.
And we wonder. Why!
Why these stories?
What is their "redeeming" value about them?
It was Nenad who suggested to me, as an acute observer of American culture, the why.
Just look at our American culture.
Our relishing of the Wild West Tales. The shoot-em' up cowboy-Indian adventures. The settlers versus "the other." The intrigue of massacre, killing, sex, violence. The excitement. The glorification. The embellishment. The conquest. The settlement. The domination.
Look at the American history of immigration. The new-comer "other" versus the all-ready here. The violence, distrust, hatred, discrimination.
Our fascination with Star Wars. Lord of the Rings. War of the Worlds.
Our addiction to CSI, The Sopranos, Dallas, and uncounted movies of the exploits of illicit sex, drama and action.
The telling and retelling of myth and legend and folklore until reality, revisionist history, and sheer fantasy are blurred beyond recognition and/or redemption.
Our perceptions, on our journey with the QBC so far, is that ancient Israel was no different from us. As the post-exile (the return of exiled Jews from their seventy-year captivity in Babylon) Jews determined to never, ever, let that breach of "other" from their "non-other" identity be the cause for them to be corporately punished again, they collected, edited, redacted, literally "stitched the scrolls together," in telling these embellished myths, legends, folk-tales and stories. Stories to emphatically differentiate their separation from "the other." To explain a purpose-driven identity and history.
We have and do the same with our "history."
As these stories were told and re-told by ancient Jews, there was, as Nenad calls it, "a sense of gusto and bravado."
Ergo . . . my depiction of a goat-herder and his participation within his contemporary society in re-telling, with gusto and bravado, his glorification of his cultural past. A visceral reaction, on my part, to a sense of culture, both for the ancient Israel peoples, and my own today, that I want to be liberated from.
Such are the joys of a shared spiritual journey.
A journey that has opened a vast and new horizon to each of us.
As Nenad suggested to me a while back, one of the lessons to be learned, is what we do with these stories. As a culture. As individuals.
Whereas fundamental Christianity has taken these myths and legends and stories, sometimes told with gusto and bravado, and codified them into a literal religious dogma that must be worshiped as an idol in and of itself, we do not need to do that. We must not do that. Anymore than we do not worship the stories of the Wild West, anymore than we do not make Lord of the Rings our scripture, anymore than we do not believe and rely on Star Wars for our authentic anthropological history. Anymore than we do not use CSI as our moral compass. Anymore than we do not look to the old series of Dallas as an exemplifier of righteous living.
Anymore than we should not look to a woman, pounding a tent-peg through a man's temple. Anymore than looking at men who rape a foreign man's wife to humiliate the husband. Anymore than we look at the maniacs at Sodom and Gomorrah who wanted to humiliate the strangers within their gate simply because it was their "right" to do so. Anymore than spies using the services of a prostitute and violating the separation of "other" from their "non-other." Anymore than cajoling a village of men into getting circumcised so they can marry their daughters, and then, in their incapacitation, murder all of them. Anymore than cheering on an Army in the massacring of tens of thousands of innocent women and children because they are "other."
To take these "vulgar, redemption-less" stories of the Hebrew Bible, to commission them as an inerrant scripture, to use them in the context of the Biblical key-text "Go, and do thou likewise," is to profane the very essence of spirituality.
And quite likely, those Hebrew Bible stories are as factual as the plots of CSI, Dallas, Star Wars and countless action-packed DVD's of drama, sex, violence and excitement.
Nenad, my personal thanksgiving to you. I have told you this before. For your suggesting we share this journey together. For your sharing of a perspective that is so liberating to me. And yes . . . for being my "instigator!" Enough so to get me into horrendous trouble in retelling a story from one of those little museum dioramas we looked at together, from those leapin' words of learnin' in that library, for egging me on to the edge of the precipice . . . but not shoving me over!! Sort of!! LOL You know I love you for it.
For a spiritual journey, whether one knows they have one or not, is a characteristic that defines humanity.
It is so good to be human.
The Refectory Manager
posted by The Refectory Manager | 3:51 PM
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