A Hindu-Christian

I don't exactly believe in the Trinity. I believe that God is One-and-Many. Three is a good number. So is seven. And twelve. And 1001. Perhaps there is no number. ("There is no spoon" for my sister/fellow Matrix fans.) God is:

God is infinite. And infinity itself.
I can't tell you how many times my sister and brother Hindu sojourners on this island in space have said that they believe in one God with many aspects and manifestations. Yet others, mostly Christians (but also Muslims and Jews) call them polytheists. I've also heard Christians reject the idea that the Trinity is three gods.
How can the Three be One for Christians and the Many not be One for Hindus?

One of the mindsets that has stayed with me after my trips to India is how many Hindus worship Christ. There are more Hindus for whom Jesus is their God than there are baptized, communing or confessing Christians in India.

I love the idea of God as Many and Pluriform. I love a God who is so much more than I am, than I can imagine or name. I also love icons and images. Perhaps the most enduring for me are smoke - incense wafting and curling, fire - candlelight and roaring fires, and water - waterfalls and crashing waves.
In the name of the Womb-waters of Earth, Unquenchable Fire and and the Most Fragrant Many-Named God, Amen.

Mother's Milk

1 Peter 2:1 So rid yourselves of all wickedness, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all the ways there are to speak ill of another. 2 Be like new-born babies, crave the unadulterated, reasonable, word-milk in order that by it you may be grown into salvation – 3 if indeed you have tasted that God who is a mother to the motherless and a father to the fatherless is good, merciful. [The New Feminist, Should-Be-Standard Translation]

Taste and see! 
What is it that we taste? The milk of the Torah, the milk of the Word, the milk of the Gospel, Mother's milk. 

Happy Mother's Day.

The God of Elizabeth Edwards

Mary Elizabeth Anania Edwards

3 July 1949 ~ 7 December 2010

"I have, I think, somewhat of an odd version of God, I do not have an intervening God. I don't think I can pray to him -- or her -- to cure me of cancer."

"The God I wanted was going to intervene. He was going to turn time back. The God I wanted was -- I was going to pray for good health and he was going to give it to me... Why in this complicated world, with so much grief and pain around us throughout the world, I could still believe that, I don't know. But I did. And then I realized that the God that I have was going to promise me salvation if I lived in the right way and he was going to promise me understanding. That's what I'm sort of asking for . . . let me understand why I was tested."

I know the God of Elizabeth Edwards. But I confess that I hope for, long for, a God who answers prayer. Sometimes. Unpredictably. And there are times when I experience that God. And it is enough.

Thoughts on the Trinity

The One is many: one, two, seven, twelve, 1001, a number beyond numbering, One...a metaphor that has become an idol. ~ https://twitter.com/prophetite

Envisioning God

She's got the whole world in her hands.

In the year of the great earthquakes, I saw the earth, high and lifted up, resting on the palms of God.

I saw the hands of God, many armed, each hand framing, supporting, blessing this fragile, tearing, earth island. Our Mother is a fierce Protectrix.

I saw myself curled and resting in her hand, on foot dangling from her fingers, swinging over the edge of the abyss. I was safely unaware of anything outside of her hand.

I looked and saw other souls safe in her embrace: on her forearm, shoulder and lap. Where first I saw one, I saw a thousand and then a number without counting. A world of people, kept safe in the divine embrace. 

And I went back to sleep.
May that peace envelope all the homeless, frightened, shaken souls crying out in pain.

Whose Prayers Does God Hear?

So much of the language of Christianity and other religions is exclusive with rewards - blessings and salvation - either exclusively or predominantly for members and insiders. Perhaps chief among those rewards is the privilege (and promise) that the Sovereign God hears our prayers. And that even if God hears the prayers of all humanity, we who are in special (or even right) relationship with God have special, intimate access. Many earnestly invite others into that special relationship, but there is still an us/them, insider/outsider dichotomy.
There is a passage in the Jewish and Christian scriptures that models a radically different practice. In his much celebrated prayer marking the Divine Habitation of the temple when God physically moves into the temple in Jerusalem in the Ark of the Covenant, Solomon entreats God to hear the prayers of foreigners.
1Kings 8:41 “When a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a distant land because of your name 42 —for they shall hear of your great name, your mighty hand, and your outstretched arm—when a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, 43 then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and so that they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built..."
What strikes me is that Solomon isn't praying for the conversion of the outsiders. He does pray that foreigners would know and reverence (fear) his God. But not that they would adopt the religious practices and beliefs of his people. It seems that many religious people and communities practice the opposite: once people have joined or converted, then they are assured that God will hear them.
What would this world be like if we all prayed that God would hear and answer the prayers of people who don't believe what we believe or worship how we worship?
There is something else in this text, Solomon imagines a world in which outsiders find prayer to his God desirable. Do the pious folk in any religious tradition - particularly those that advocate conversion - conduct themselves (ourselves) in such a way that anyone outside our communities actually wants to pray to our God?

God Created Them In God's Image

As a post-colonial scholar I have learned to be critical of binaries – two opposing views, positions or categories that sum up any idea or experience, including physical manifestations of gender in the human species.

Things are not either black or white, right or wrong and people are not only not just gay or straight, but also neither are they either male or female.

The world is complicated and complex. Are so are the people who inhabit it.

People have come into this world with indeterminate or multiple expressions of gender from the beginning of humanity’s sojourn on this globe. At every level of scrutiny from genital to genomic, there are more than two types of human body configurations. (This doesn’t even take into account all of the internal physiological variety among individuals – everything from where the aorta branches to where the internal organs are in the body.)

Along with the false notion that people are either female or male is the cultural assumption here in the West (and to varying degrees in other parts of the world) that there is a way to be male and a way to be female. And that way in each case is single and the polar opposite – or complement – of the other.

I am reminded of this when I hear some – certainly not all – trans-persons, persons in the process of changing their gender discussing why their new gender is who they are. Many rely on stereotypes that articulate single ways of being female or male: I like baking, I love football, I never/always played with dolls. It does not surprise me that there are some trans-folk who eventually seek to have their surgery reversed as much as possible and return to life as a person of the gender identity the lived previously, from birth.

This is not to say that there are no folk who have legitimate gender identity issues which are appropriately resolved through therapeutic means including pharmacological and surgical means. I am not making that claim.

I am interested in those folk whose expressed gender identity does not conform to an idealized norm. They may be living a gender-neutral life as much as they are able, they may be living a gender identity that is at odds with their biological gender but feel no need for surgery to fell complete as a wo/man. They may simply be lesbian or gay.

There are so many ways to be fe/male. I simply get nervous when I hear people making life-altering decisions for them and for their children based in part on stereotypes. And I know that most responsible surgeons work with therapists and that gender transition takes time by design.

I just wonder how some folk would understand themselves if they weren’t limited to two options.