Adoration Part Two

As I mentioned last week, Father Michael’s been putting out a monstrance for Adoration these last couple of weeks of Advent. My last experience was pretty emotional & very intense.

Tonight’s was also, but in a very different way.

This time I went having heard much less bad news, which didn’t mean I was necessarily having a good day. I had a weird day. But it wasn’t an awful day.

I went in a cheerful mood. I was happy to be ending my day in this manner, knowing that everyone else was busy with a vestry meeting, & I’d selfishly have Christ all to myself again.

I knelt for a bit, & in my head I sang the little chant Father Vladimir taught us:

Here’s my heart, Lord.

Here’s my heart, Lord.

Here’s my heart, Lord.

Speak what is true.

I did that for a good long while with a smile on my face, then just said “Speak, for your servant is listening.” And then I was quiet in my mind.

Here is where some of you will think I am crazy.

I perceived Mary sitting on the pew next to me. I knew she wasn’t actually there there, but she was there. She looked so young & yet spoke with such an aged, wise voice, in a slow, deliberate way, like English was her second language, but she was very good at it if she took her time. She glanced up at the monstrance subtly. “You can sit back,” she said gently. “You’re in pain.”

So I did.

She said, “I knelt by his cradle when he was a baby. And I fell to my knees when he died on that cross.” She said it so carefully and lovingly. I burst into tears.

She spent a good long time telling me some things that might not make any sense to you, but they made perfect sense to me. She said to love him as she loved him, because he is both her son and her God. She knew it was strange.

She said that he never didn’t love me, even when I denied him. You want to talk about a Jewish mother guilt trip. But she didn’t mean for me to feel bad. She just wanted me to know. I felt bad because I felt guilty.

And then Christ was there. I mean, he’s always there, but he was part of this conversation. “Hey, you were a child,” he said, & for some reason Mary sounds like she’s from Israel, but Jesus sounds like he’s from Yonkers. There is nothing I can do about that; he always sounds like a 30-something rabbi from Yonkers to me.

I was basically sobbing at this point. “You were a child & you were in so much pain.”

“He cried with you,” she said. “He cried for you.”

So basically I’ve completely lost it alone in this dark church & Jesus is walking me through some stuff I feel like crap about & he’s explaining where he was during all that & helping me love & understand difficult people. He’s also forgiving me for not getting things at the time.

He & Mary are also consoling me on some difficult people & things now. And telling me that no, it’s not fair but if anyone can handle it, I can.

But where I completely surrendered to the conversation & cried like a child was when he very plainly said to me, “I love you so much. Hey, I love you. You have no idea.” And Mary said it too & I just kind of crumpled on the kneeler & sobbed like a child.

Which of course is when Father walked in & had to lock up the church. But his timing was impeccable; if he’d come in a couple minutes earlier, I would’ve missed all that.

I’m not telling you this because it’s a special experience just for me. It’s a message for you, too. Jesus loves you. You have no idea how much. You can’t possibly comprehend it. I can’t.

Also I get the impression Mary feels a little sorry for men, because they have a hard time being vulnerable. And sometimes they are mean about it. That was really good mom advice. Jesus was basically like, “Ya know, she’s not wrong.”

So that’s the story of my near hour with Jesus & his mom. She thinks of the church as her daughter-in-law. Isn’t that sweet?

I am going to see if other parishes have weekly or daily adoration, because there is nothing like it & I want to go again. I don’t know if it’ll be the same as St. Nicholas — a dark, cold church lit only by a few candles with lingering Sunday scents I know & love — but I want to try.

I Once Was (a) Lost (Stupid Cat), But Now Am Found

Things all happen at once, for a reason, and I have no control over them, the bastards.

The more I try to not talk about my more recent religious experiences, the more they keep popping up like so much cat hair on black trousers. I need to let the cat thing go, but I can’t. Jesus is now irretrievably linked in my mind with crazy cat ladies. Yes, this is another Jesus post.

A very sweet, extremely kind new friend has sat through my nonsense & answered my questions & not ever preached at me. I mentioned him in my second to last written post. I am only going to post my responses to his responses to my questions, but here you will kind of see how I got here, where I was before, in a way I could not organize in my usual rambling goofball manner of writing.

“My experience with Christianity was almost the opposite, as neither of my parents were much interested in church. When I was a little girl, I was what some people would term a nearly psychotic born again Christian. When I embrace a religion, there is no grey for me. If the Bible said not to do something, I didn’t do it. In my linguistic ignorance, I even took the no swearing thing to mean I couldn’t even call my little brother a jackass.

It made other Christian kids in my Christian school nuts, of course. Not only did I have a funny accent & wreck the curve, but I was goody goody to a fault. I guess. I was fairly obsessed with Jesus. Any thoughts not dedicated to She-Ra were dedicated to Christ.  I loved music but since all pop music was evil, I rewrote songs with Christian lyrics. I witnessed to anybody who gave me 4 seconds. And etc. Is it any wonder when I realized how badly I was being hurt by [omitted] that I would cling to a more positive male role model? And when I was old enough to realize how much damage I had sustained, to completely turn my back on a God who didn’t protect me? Yeah, through the last 3 years of high school, I was an ardent atheist. And a mess.

It’s hard to be an atheist, though, when all your prior life has been an orgy of faith. In college I discovered & militantly upheld the strictest tenets of other religions (like a Christian, someone once derisively said). However, over the past year or so Buddhism has not really met my “needs”, I guess. Buddhism totally jibes with Christianity, seeing as how Jesus is viewed as a Western bodhisattva, & my insistence that Greater Path Buddhism is superior to the more-traditionally-embraced-in-the-West-because-it’s-more-“intellectual” Lesser Path speaks to my inherent, unshakeable belief in salvation. So…what am I doing?

This is going to sound stupid, but the final straw was when Adam posted that photo labeled “Resurrection Day”. As it was a clear rejection of the pagan celebration of Eostre, I looked it up to see if he was a Jehovah’s Witness or something like. What shocked me is that I came across one particularly well done site, I guess, because I read more than a couple of paragraphs. By like the 4th paragraph I was actually in tears. I still can’t tell you why, as I have no idea. I just became unbelievably sad, like I had abandoned a sweet old relative who loved me, but couldn’t tell me, in the hospital, for years, without visiting. I was also overwhelmed by the sense that I would be welcomed lovingly back if I had the bravery to walk in the door.

Not quite yet.

Jeez, have I rambled enough yet? Look, I haven’t talked to anybody about this yet, but you seem like the sort of person who might understand. I’m just not sure what to do. Even hinting to some of my friends that I am considering Christianity again sends them into peels of laughter or funny looks. If they’d known me longer, they’d totally get it…

My fear is that I will become inflexible again. I really was insufferable as a kid, and I also have no idea how to reconcile Christian belief with the sort of lax way most people practice. To me it has always seemed that if you’re going to believe something, you ought to live it every moment of your life, not when it’s convenient. However, I am single again, & it could be inconvenient. A lot.

I really don’t know how to do this.

Thanks for enduring.”

And later… 

“So for witnessing, as I’m sure you’ve noticed I just sort of speak my mind. I was like that as a kid too. Even in other religious systems, I’ve been something of a teacher; it’s just my way to explain the tenets of faith & ethics to people. What you’re doing w/ your blog & posts etc. is the same thing.

And now for the Once Saved Always Saved stuff. I was in love with a boy for a long time who was allegedly a Christian. He, despite being my friend & clearly attracted to me, rejected me in part because of my religious beliefs. He also drank too much, lied, slacked off, all the things I didn’t think Christians should do. He said that it didn’t matter what he did, because he was saved. That pissed me off. I told him that being saved didn’t give him license to be a prick (this clearly is when I was getting over him) and he actually said it did.

After reading those passages I now see he had fallen out of fellowship with God.

My revelation that I had the other day was that Jesus wants me back. He’s going about it in a weird, circuitous route, but I see how it was necessary. When I read the thing about how no one can snatch us from His hand & how it’s His job to shepherd us, I realized He’s been doing that all along. He just had to do it in a way that would make sense to my brain. He had to bring me back to Christianity from atheism by appealing to my rational mind, exposing me to doctrines that seemed less harsh than the Bible so I could find the compassion in it again. The compassion was missing from my school, from my study. We clearly spent far too much time on the angry God of the OT; how else would I have missed all the NT passages re: grace?!

Reading works about Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, & reading works by the Dalai Lama kinda prepped me for the reality that Jesus was also a teacher of compassion. It would take an act of the purest compassion for a supernatural being to allow Himself to be crucified for others, much like Kuan Yin in her corporeal form, Princess Maio Shan, died in a fire to save a house full of nuns or cut off her arm & leg to heal a selfish king (depending on the story) except of course Christ’s sacrifice was for all mankind, including those yet to come.

Kuan Yin hears the cries of the world & will help even the most horrible person if they call on her in faith. This is what Jesus does, but I didn’t quite get that until I came to understand Kuan Yin.

So. From study of Wicca leading to a study of Taoism leading to a study of Buddhism which lead me to greater vehicle Kuan Yin stuff, I was prepped to come back to Jesus, I think. He was trying to get me back all along, He just had to shepherd me through a strange & winding forest first. I’m getting that now. It’s amazing how much trouble He’s gone to to get me; I only hope I don’t disappoint Him!

Trying to sort out what to do next…“

The What Next of course was to stop being a pussy & just realize I was a Christian. And to not be ashamed to tell people. I mean duh. And this is the world we live in, where it’s harder to admit you’re a Christian than Wiccan or Buddhist. Really & truly, we live in strange times. Exciting, open, & one would hope, conducive to dialogue, but a strange time nonetheless.

And weirdly, Adam Baldwin blogged about it sorta today. Check it out: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/abaldwin/2010/01/05/secularisms-drones-sting-brit-hume/ Here is my response, which was posted to the site (yay, they fixed it!) but it might also show another part of the process I had to go through, which is rejecting high & mighty fusspot-ism. I did it as a Christian, as a Wiccan, as a Buddhist, as an ‘intellectual’ secular “Wait, everybody gets equal time by getting NO time” goober-pants. I now realize that religious devotion, even devotion to non-religion, does NOT equal the right to indulge in fusspot-ism. Observe:

“Holy cow (or not, since we’re not Hindu), you have hit the nail so hard on the head, you’ve made pennies. And I can say this as being a reformed jerk who might at one point have snarkily agreed a little with our histrionic friend Keith. There was a time, when I myself was a Buddhist, where I would have insisted on the secularization of society at the same time perfectly willing to discuss my religion with anybody personally who asked. Don’t ask me how this made sense in my head, because I have no idea myself. I seem to recall not wanting to offend anybody, & not wanting to be beaten over the head with other people’s religions. However, I’ve finally noticed that when we go out of our way to treat everybody the same, we end up being jerks to everybody & giving them the lowest consideration possible. *cough HEALTHCARE cough*

Buddhists are pretty mellow about other people’s beliefs & are meant to extinguish desire & all sense of the self, existing only for the greater good. Horrifying to a Republican, huh?! Part of the reason I returned to Christianity (yeah, Keith, here’s your PERFECT example!) is because I felt the tug of the personal relationship with Christ. And seriously, I was practicing a salvation-based version of Buddhism anyway. Greater Path Buddhism, which most Westerners dismiss as superstitious & too “religiony”, is very much rooted in the idea that the bodhisattvas can help us be better people. Although I developed a prolonged and enjoyable study of Kuan Yin, the female bodhisattva of compassion, who hears the cries of the world, I was still constantly missing something. It wasn’t until I got back in touch with Christ that I felt that thing *clonk* into place.

That thing is what Mr. Hume is talking about. It’s not a get-out-of-hell-free card, it’s not an instant pass for committing adultery (um…Keith, have you READ Matthew 5:27-28?! Jesus is kind of sour on the whole adultery thing). It’s not “Look at me, I’m a Christian now! I don’t have to meditate any more or work on extinguishing desire like Buddhists do. It’s easy because Jesus forgives everything!” Not so much. Meditation, or prayer, is a necessary component to a relationship with Christ. Extinguishing desire (though bloody infrickenpossible) is treasured in Christianity, too. I think the way Jesus, who does forgive us all even though we’re jerks, sees desire is that if we put our own wants & needs before other people, that’s not cool. But He gets that we’re stupid humans & we do stupid human tricks. I recently talked & blogged about this very thing, comparing Jesus to a crazy cat lady…you had to be there, I spose.

Mr. Hume’s suggestion, from his own experience I gather, that Tiger Woods can benefit from a relationship with Christ was hardly bombastic, jihadist (don’t make me cackle) or even preachy. It was just a suggestion. “Yo, here’s what works for me, brah. This is something you might want to look into, since you’re in a bad, bad way right now.” Jesus gets people out of bad ways. In Buddhism, you really have only yourself & your own self control to rely upon. Clearly Tiger has none of that. God has infinite power, and can do more for us than we can do for ourselves.

Thank you for bringing this story to an audience who might not ever have noticed. Yeah, they’re all angry & secular now, but any time we are exposed to other ideas, we learn & grow, even if we don’t accept those ideas. An open, respectful dialogue regarding religion & salvation is certainly preferable, I see now, to shutting everybody up about their faiths & making them go inside & practice in secret (kinda like smoking in CalNeva). Has religion become masturbation now?! It honestly feels like that’s what atheists want us to do…go do that in the bathroom! Nobody wants to see that!

So what if somebody who doesn’t believe as we do prays in front of us, even if it’s in school? The amendment says freedom of religion, not repression of it so nobody is potentially offended. Freedom is being offended sometimes. It’s the price we pay for getting to be who we are. It’s not that bad a fine; it’s way better than the alternative.”

I realize now my response was about as long as his original post. *headdesk* Well, to me it’s always like we’re having a conversation when I respond to a blog. And I did high school debate, so everybody gets their ten minutes for Poz & Neg, and…ACK! I really need to get over that, apparently…

Please don’t hate on me because I’m Christian. Please?