Tag: religion

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on war, religion, and faith

I am not a religious person. What I believe doesn’t fit into neat little boxes, or for that matter, a church pew. I am, however, a student of religion because religion shapes our world.

Notice I say religion, not faith. The two can be mutually exclusive. Religion seeks to subjugate, control. Faith is freedom, or it can be. I guess it depends on where you put your faith.

Today, three of the biggest religions are celebrating holy days. I know people of all three religions, all three faiths. They live their faith daily. It is part of who they are and their faith is beautiful. Their religions? Not so much, in my opinion.

Why is that? I think it’s because faith is an individual thing. It lives in a person’s heart. Religion, on the other hand, is a man-made expression of what a group of men said they believed thousands of years ago, modified and codified and made rigid by human beings who maybe started with the best of intentions, then discovered the money and power available to them through the enforcing of said religion.

I don’t begrudge anyone their faith. Believe what is in your heart to believe. I have no desire to stop you.

So, where does the war part come in?

It’s no secret that religion has been used to justify war for centuries and it continues today. Right here in the US there is a concerted religious war on LGBTQ+ folks, on a woman’s right to control her body and on critical thinking. Around the world, religious groups attack other religious groups as they have done since the beginning of time.

And perhaps most jarring to me at this moment in time is the time and money that will be spent in religious celebration while men, women, and children are under siege by a megalomaniac. Not that I expect us all to sit and wring our hands all day every day over what is happening in Ukraine, not at all.

However, it might be nice if those religious leaders would stop praising the megalomaniac, and lead their congregations in support of those fleeing the violence.

Happy Easter/Passover/Ramadan, if you celebrate, Readers. Please keep Ukraine in your thoughts and remember that Kindness Matters.

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

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what matters is now

For a long time, in my teens and early twenties, I was sure that we would see the end of the world in my lifetime. Part of me clung to science fiction in what I only now recognize as hope that I was wrong, or some unacknowledged notion that even if Armageddon was to happen, some part of who we are, the best parts of who we are if I’m using Star Trek as an example, would live on outside the scenario I was taught.

Even after I learned my way out of that fear, and out of that particular flavor of Christianity, I maintained a love of sci-fi and in particular dystopian stories. The little spark of hope, that even if the worst of humanity prevailed, something good could remain was a driving factor in what and how I changed myself.

I’ve traveled a lot of roads spiritually and academically since then, and what I believe has changed and grown as I did. In some ways, the more I learn, the more I question, and I am less sure of a good deal many things than I have ever been.

One thing I do know, however, is that what I believe about where we come from, what comes after this life, whether or not there is a god or gods, does not define how I live my life. I no longer believe that my eternity rests on a belief, or on a specific god or on a specific ritual. Or, if it does, I am not interested in it at least.

What matters to me is this life. How I live now. How I treat others now. How I grow and learn now. Love and kindness are what motivate me, both for how I approach the world and how I approach myself.

We’re here, on this earth, now. This is what matters.

Those are my thinky thoughts for this Sunday morning, Readers! I hope you are well and that your life is filled with love and kindness. I’m off into the world of The Blood Witch with my Death Wish coffee in hand.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

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cognitive dissonance

As someone who was at one time an Evangelical Christian, my relationship with Easter is, at best, problematic. At one time in my life, I considered this to be the most sacred of holy days. Today, it represents all that I came to despise about Christianity.

Unlike Christmas, which I can sink into as a family holiday, a secular celebration of the ones I love, I can not reconcile a secular Easter. Sure, here in the US, Easter is at least as much about candy and bunnies and such as it is about the resurrection of Christ, and there are a fair number of Pagan roots behind some of it, but somehow I have never been able to divorce the Christian understanding of the death and resurrection of their Savior from the fertility rites of spring.

There’s a lot of bad theology, along with some basic premises of Christianity, at play in my feelings. The brand of Christianity I walked away from was a bit fringe and very devoted to the idea that human beings, at their very core, are dirty, filthy, something to be denied the right to present themselves to the supposedly loving god who created them without painting themselves in the blood of another.

The cognitive dissonance that comes with marrying this idea to the idea of a loving god was what I think eventually broke through the programming and freed me up to really study the theology and religion as well as freeing my heart to actually find love.

I’m not going to go into details here. If you’re really interested you could visit my other blog and dig through old posts where I was processing out what I believe and what I really don’t believe. I haven’t posted over there in a long time though. Happy Spelunking!

Because of the way we pick the date of Easter, I often forget about it until I sign into Facebook and see a bunch of posts about it. Some years this has sent me spiraling through a bunch of not great emotional debris and internal dialog. This year seems to be less a spiral and more like a blip of “oh, hey, yeah…that was a thing” feeling. Maybe it’s the amount of introspection this year has involved.

Or maybe I’m outgrowing the trauma. And yes, I liken that theology to trauma.

Anyway, all of that to say, if you celebrate the return of spring or the return of your god, or just that it’s Sunday, I hope your celebration is fulfilling and filled with life and kindness.

Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

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#vote

Tomorrow is the big day. Election day. We’ve seen record breaking turn outs to early voting and absentee/mail in voting, but that is no reason to get complacent. It is our duty, as American citizens, and in a time like ours not one of us can take that duty lightly.

This election cycle is more make or break than any I can remember. In the last four years our country has become more divided, more broken than I have ever seen. We are divided racially, ethnically, politically, religously and by hatred. In many cases it is a hatred that has been foisted upon us, or drug out of our inner psyche to be put on display.

Somehow, we’ve given permission to our baser selves to be brazenly angry about differences, about changes and about something as simple a concept as equality. We seem to find it easier to demonize those we see as enemies, call them names and deny them basic human dignity.

But we shouldn’t make ourselves feel better about ourselves at the expense of others. We don’t need to deny other people rights to keep those rights for ourselves. As someone once said, it isn’t pie.

I’ve seen more racism, ageism, ableism, sexism and hate of the LGBTQ+ community in the last four years than I can actually believe existed four years ago. Hate is contagious, and it is spreading faster than the coronavirus.

But tomorrow we have the ability to stand up and make it known that hate has no home here. It might be our last chance.

I won’t elaborate on all the various ways the person who is supposed to be leading us has instead worked to destroy us, there are plenty of other people doing that. Instead, my focus is on healing us, as a country. Our first step is to vote out those who foster and stoke the fires of hate, who pit us against each other so we won’t notice that they are robbing us blind.

Vote as if your life depended on it, because it might. Vote as if your BIPOC neighbors lives depend on it, because they do. Vote as if your gay brother’s marriage is on the line, because it is. Vote, not with the hate they want you to feel, but with the love you have for your family and your country.

If you haven’t already cast your vote, I hope you have a plan to get to the polls tomorrow. I hope you make it a priority in your day.

Above all, I wish you kindness and joy, Readers. Kindness and joy.

Cover Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

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yule logs and pumpkins and the fear of 13

It’s Friday the 13th, which honestly is a day I love, and not only because I was born on one.  I’ll be honest, most superstitions strike me as odd, but they tell us a lot about who we are, or who we came from.  The roots of such superstitions can be illuminating, and they illustrate the times and lives of our ancestors.

I’ll be honest here, I often take a perverse sort of pleasure in purposely defying superstition.  I dress in black on Friday the 13ths, today replete with skulls.  I adore black cats, the only fear I have of ladders is of falling off of them.

This juxtaposition of Friday the 13th against the landslide down to Christmas is amusing, not the least because it invokes the whole Nightmare Before Christmas scenario.  I’m that person who has Halloween decorations up (for some value of decoration, I don’t do much) year round.  Right now the area in front of my TV is filled with pumpkins and witches and candles and some pine boughs…

I don’t do a lot of decorating, mostly because I hate taking it down and putting it away!  One year I had Christmas lights up until nearly July.  I save that urge for my mother’s house, where I will be going tomorrow to help her get the tree up and all that fun stuff.

I may go so far as to decorate a Yule log and burn it in my fire pit one night, we’ll see how I’m feeling about it, and if the rain lets up long enough to make it happen.  Yule is pretty low key for me generally, as a Pagan, but I do want to recognize the rebirth of the sun and the return of the daylight as we pass the solstice and the days grow longer once more.

Christmas is a secular celebration for me, a time to spend with those that love me and to give gifts that remind them of my love for them.

But for today, I’ll just wrap my arms around the day and celebrate the overcoming of fear.  I should probably also re-heat my breakfast, which has gone cold and drink some more coffee, because coffee is life!

Happy Friday, Readers!  May the 13th shower you with good things!

 

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Beltane blessings

Today is the first day of May.  May Day.  Beltane.  It is a holy day of promise for the future, a day of planting seeds for the harvest to come.

This is a day that celebrates spring, when the youngest flowers bloom and the air is filled with the light fragrance that whispers of the summer that is just around the corner.

And yes, it is a day closely associated with fertility.  In some Pagan traditions it is celebrated with bawdy tales of trysts in the woods between willing partners, or with drinking and feasting and ritualized representation of the sex act.

All of that is to remind us that this is the time when Mother Earth is her most fertile, when she is waiting for us to run our plow into her and deposit our seed into her soil, so that she may nurture and grow it to provide for our sustenance in the long months of winter.

So, blessings you, Readers, if you celebrate…and if you don’t.  Happy Wednesday either way!  May your planting find fertile ground so that the harvest is plentiful!

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happy spring?

It’s another rainy, rainy day here in San Francisco.  Just walking from BART to the office has my legs soaked from the knees down.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the rain, and gods know we needed it, but after a solid month of the stuff, I find myself craving the sun.  My cats are also completely over the rain.  This morning, instead of getting up with me, they sat on the bed staring at the pet door.

The streets are turning into rivers and the ground everywhere is just saturated.  I am sure all of the plants are thrilled that we have escaped drought status, but I think I am quite over the rain at this point.

Enough of that, however.  Today is Ostara on the Pagan calendar, the spring equinox.  Today is the tipping point that dumps us out of winter and onward toward summer.  From here out the days start to get longer, at least until midsummer.

It is a time to plant intentions, to begin new things.  Get those seeds in some dirt and let’s grow something profound!

Of course, it’s also Wednesday, so here I am in the office like a good worker drone.  Lots to do, coffee to consume, etc, etc…

How about you, Readers?  What are you looking to grow this season?

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the elusive nature of unconditional love

Back in the day when I was an evangelical Christian (yes, really), I  spoke a lot about unconditional love.  I believed that I acted inside that love.  I believed that I understood what unconditional love really was.

The truth is, I was clueless.

It took a lot of changes in my life to realize that.  It took leaving behind everything I thought I knew, everything I believed.  It took discovering myself under all of the layers of learned behavior and belief/fear conditioning.  I often liken those days to days spent in a cult.

Unconditional love is something that springs from inside you and because of that, nothing external to you can change it.  Nothing someone does, nothing someone says can change that kind of love.

That’s a really powerful thing.  It’s the kind of thing that changes lives.  It changed mine.  I’m not saying I practice it perfectly, I am, after all, still human.  And I’m not aiming for sainthood here.  I still make snap judgments about people.  I still criticize things I know I shouldn’t.  But I try to embody unconditional love to all.

It’s what drives me to act with kindness.  To meet people where they are, as they are and try to be helpful without inserting my own prejudice and needs into their life.  It’s why I can be friends with people so very different to me. How I can give of myself where others won’t.

Sure, sometimes I miss the mark, but the longer I practice this idea, the longer I choose to put love and kindness ahead of judgement and fear, the better I get at it.   I just keep hoping to one day get it right.

I hope your Saturday is filled with the light of Love, Readers, and that you radiate that love back out into the world around you.  Let’s light this place up!

 

 

 

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kindness matters

The guiding principle that I follow is simple: Kindness Matters.

From the tiny gestures like holding the elevator for someone, or a smile in passing to the bigger gestures like buying coffee or lunch for someone to the grandiose gestures, like paying off someone’s debt or buying someone a car…it all matters.

I try to infuse my life with that kindness, to live each and every day thinking about kindness first.  I started to think this way years and years ago, and with each passing day I get better at it.

I still have unkind thoughts, that’s just human, but when I do, I stop myself and think about what is driving that thought.  Usually, it isn’t because of anything someone else has said or done.  Nearly always it is because I am being cranky.  I generally treat it by doing something kind for someone else.

Funny thing is, it works.

I am a happier person in general since I adopted this notion, since I brought kindness first into my life.  I can’t pay off anyone debts (including my own) in a grand sweeping notion, but I can buy the homeless guy trying to stay dry and warm in the nearly endless rain we’re experiencing now a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich.  I’m not buying anyone a car anytime soon, but I can knit or crochet hats and scarves for people on the street.  I can bake cookies to take to work to share, even though I can’t have any.  I can hold the elevator door for the mother with two toddlers and a stroller and a diaper bag and briefcase on her way to the daycare on the 2nd floor.

I can also accept people for who they present themselves to be, faults and flaws and all, and love them for who they are.  I can offer the people around me the permission to be themselves, wholly and completely simply by being myself wholly and completely.  This is why I generally have no filter.

I am not ashamed of who I am:  Fat, 50, geeky, kinky, dorky, thinky, cis-gendered female (with all that implies…boobs, periods, mood swings, hot flashes, etc), agoraphobic, socially awkward.  I don’t hide much, I don’t keep much private, even though others think I should.

It’s a kindness I give to the world around me in the hope that one day we will stop being ashamed of things in which there should be no shame.  There’s enough pain and shame and blame and misery in this world.  No need to invent more.

So, on this rainy Wednesday, give yourself permission to be you, and remember that kindness really does matter.  It can change lives.  It changed mine.

 

 

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the last stand

I haven’t really talked enough about Where Shadows Fall. I struggled a bit with getting this book done, maybe in part because I knew it would be the end of my living in that world, at least for a while.

The grand finale takes place in Washington D.C., which I think was rather inevitable, given what we know about the man pulling the strings.  I didn’t set out to have a meglomanical bad guy.  In the beginning he was just a guy who believed that Others were evil.  Clearly, I maintained some of that in the overall story however.

To me there is nothing as frightening as a person who believes without doubt, someone who fears that other for no concrete reason but because they have been told to believe. They can’t be reasoned with. No argument will penetrate the protective barrier of that belief mixed with fear and hate.

I always thought that it came from religion, from man’s need to control mankind’s access to gods and the power that came with that.  However, as we can see in America today, it doesn’t have to come from within religion.  It need only wrap itself in the cloth that resembles religion to draw people in.

I find that terrifying.  Maybe that’s why the 8th Battalion became one of the big bads in these books.  It certainly drives the character of Colonel Shallon.  Blind belief is a dangerous weapon.

That is where my thoughts are today, Readers.  I hope yours are more pleasant on this cold, January Saturday.

 

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