On Beyond Jesus

From Red Cardigan:

Many people have already posted excerpts from this, reported by the Catholic Key, which helps explain why some women religious are being investigated:

When religious communities embraced the spirit of renewal in the 1970s, they took seriously that the world was no longer the enemy, that a sense of ecumenism required encountering the holy “other,” and that the God of Jesus might well be the God of Moses and the God of Mohammed. The works of Thomas Merton encouraged an exploration of the nexus between Eastern and Western religious practices. The emergence of the women’s movement with is concomitant critique of religion invited women everywhere to use a hermeneutical lens of suspicion when reading the androcentric Scriptures and the texts of the Tradition. With a new lens, women also began to see the divine within nature, the value and importance of the cosmos, and that the emerging new cosmology encouraged their spirituality and fed their souls.

As one sister described it, “I was rooted in the story of Jesus, and it remains at my core, but I’ve also moved beyond Jesus.” The Jesus narrative is not the only or the most important narrative for these women. They still hold up and reverence the values of the Gospel, but they also recognize that these same values are not solely the property of Christianity. Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Judaism, Islam and others hold similar tenets for right behavior within the community, right relationship with the earth and right relationship with the Divine. With these insights come a shattering or freeing realization—depending on where you stand. Jesus is not the only son of God. Salvation is not limited to Christians. Wisdom is found in the traditions of the Church as well as beyond it.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of a story:

On Beyond Jesus (with apologies to Dr. Seuss)

Said Sister Androgina Guevara Mao,
(An old friend of mine who worships the Tao):
You start out by studying Adam and Eve
(Though I find that story too hard to believe)
Then you go through the prophets; you study the kings
Who all hated women (misogynist things!)
Some poems called psalms, and some proverbs, and then–
You get to the Gospels; and that’s where it ends.
You read about Jesus, you learn His whole story,
With good bits with women, and other parts gory,
And then you should know, from the very Creation,
The whole of the story of humans’ salvation.

I was nodding–because that is how it should go–
When she frowned and said sternly: No. Oh, dear, no!
That’s what they tell you, that’s what they try
To make you believe while you live till you die.
But some of us know this is no place to stop!
I could keep finding prophets and myths till I drop!
You can stop, if you want, with the Lord Jesus Christ.
But not me!
I won’t stop here, not at any price!

If you stop here with Jesus, you’ll never explore
The non-androcentric religions galore:
The ones that have goddesses, holy and wise
With perhaps a bit more than their fair share of eyes,
The one around Buddha–you really should try it!
If nothing else Buddhism’s good for your diet.
And then there are legends of spirits that come
When you carve a big totem or beat a big drum.

So, on beyond Jesus! To Zeus and to Hera!
Don’t let a word like “heretic” scare ya.
There’s so much empowerment you’ll never know
If you stop at Jesus. So go, go, go, go!
Go on to the Norse Gods, to Freya or Thor
You’ll learn so much more than you could have before.
Cosmology, circles, spell-casting and chant–
But not the old sort. No, that kind we can’t.
We’ve forgotten the words, if we ever did know them,
Besides, we worked hard so we could overthrow them.

On beyond Jesus! There’s so much beside Him!
The gods of the Romans, (though they crucified Him)
Are interesting sorts, like the two-headed Janus.
We’d put up an altar to him, but they’d ban us,
Those narrow suspicious ones coming to check–
They’ve seen our free writings, but called them all dreck.
They stopped at Jesus, and now you can see,
Just what would happen to you–and to me!
If we stopped at Jesus, and never went past Him.
We’d be just like them–but we will outlast them!

Oh, maybe some orders are doing quite well,
Who stopped at Jesus. It’s hard to tell.
They have new members, and growth, and much joy.
But what we have is better. Oh boy, yes, oh boy,
We went beyond Jesus! Our convents are empty,
Young Catholics avoid us, or say things contempt-y.
We have no future, we turned from our past,
We built nothing permanent, nothing that lasts.
But we did explore all the gods ever prayed to!
Except the real God, unless we were paid to.

So what if our convents are left now in tatters?
We went beyond Jesus. And that’s all that matters.

I shook my head sadly as she finished talking,
Said my goodbyes, and quickly left, walking
Straight through the big labyrinth inside her foyer,
She shouted at me, but I just ignored her.

Advertisement

Why Susan Boyle inspires us: A story like ‘a Disney movie’

From USA Today:

Watch video on YouTube here.

After a week of unabashed hysteria about Scottish chanteuse Susan Boyle, it’s time to pause and ask: What’s that all about?

A psychological boost for a world battered by economic calamity? A spiritual moment for millions in search of transcendence? Maybe it’s about rooting for the underdog. Or maybe it’s just a new reminder of an old truism: You can’t judge a book by its cover.

“Susan Boyle is a Disney movie waiting to happen,” says church worker Janelle Gregory, 34, of Olathe, Kan.

Boyle, for those who have been unconscious lately, is the middle-aged woman with frizzy hair who has been all over TV and computer screens for days, singing a Broadway show tune while millions wept and shouted and applauded wildly.

Ten days ago, Boyle — 47, unglamorous, unfashionable, unknown — faced down a sneering British audience and panel of judges on Britain’s Got Talent, including the ever-sneery Simon Cowell. Then, in an instant, she turned jeers to cheers with her rendition of one of the weepier numbers from Les Misérables. Almost as instantly, Boyle went viral: A clip on YouTube garnered millions of hits (almost 30 million so far, not counting millions more on thousands of other versions on YouTube).

“All of us reveled in the fact that even in our image-managed world, we could still have the tables turned on us,” says Terry Christopher, 40, a computer developer in Phoenix.

For the English-speaking media, still breathless from covering the introduction of Bo the White House puppy, Boyle is cable catnip. Last week, she was on TV from early morning to late night, telling her Cinderella back story (youngest of nine, learning-disabled and bullied as a child, caretaker for her dying mother, never been kissed, singer in the choir, possessor of big dreams) to all who trekked in person or by satellite to her Scottish village outside Edinburgh.

The common refrain in comments about Boyle: I watched her over and over, and I cried and cried. “Every time I watched it, I felt emotional,” says Julie Carrigan, 47, a mother of five in Hemet, Calif.

But why?

• It’s the vindication. “When they were making fun of her, I was getting annoyed,” Carrigan says. “And inside I’m thinking, ‘I hope she blows them away.’ I was so happy when she just let them have it.”

• It’s the surprise. “If you have expectations of someone, you need to be prepared to be surprised by them,” says Paul Potts, the chunky former cellphone salesman who was the Susan Boyle of Britain’s Got Talent in 2007 and has since sold millions of records as an opera-and-standards singer. His second album, Passione, arrives in the USA May 5. “It’s part of human nature to make judgments based on first impressions, but sometimes we allow ourselves to be misguided by first impressions.”

• It’s the guilt. Why the surprise? There’s no correlation between appearance and talent, says Scott Grantham, 35, a financial analyst in Atlanta. “If she didn’t look the way she did, would there be the same reaction? I don’t think so,” he says. “We make snap judgments based on appearance, and when we see those judgments were premature, we overcompensate by going so far in the other direction.”

• It’s the shame. Boyle forced people to recognize how often they dismiss or ignore people because of their looks. “Is Susan Boyle ugly? Or are we?” asked essayist Tanya Gold in Britain’s The Guardian.

• It’s the psychology. “There’s an emotional state called elevation, characterized by a warm, glowing feeling, that we get when someone transcends our expectations,” says Lynn Johnson, a psychologist in Salt Lake City. Boyle is “an elevator — we want to believe in something higher, that there’s meaning in life and that the ugly duckling can become the beautiful swan.”

• It’s the hope. “She has truly touched my heart and soul and lifted my spirits,” says Anne Jolley of San Jose, who describes herself as 47, unemployed, frumpy and “disheartened, disenfranchised, disillusioned and dis-just-about-everything-else in these bleak times.” The messages of Boyle, she says, are that “there is hope still in this world; that dreams really can come true; that cynical people can be turned around; that maybe my best years are not behind me after all.”

• It’s the distraction. With everything going on in the world, “our economy in the tank, my husband and I worried that we will lose our jobs — this was a feel-good/underdog story, and I ate it up,” says Lisa Sweetnich, 40, a CPA in Massillon, Ohio.

• It’s empowerment. “What are we all crying about?” asked writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin, founding editor of Ms. magazine, in her Huffington Post blog. “Partly, I think it’s that a woman closing in on 50 had the courage to compete with the kids — and blew them out of the water.”

• It’s the authenticity. Unlike most of the contestants on, say, American Idol, Boyle clearly has not been groomed to be a pop star, so she is perceived as the real deal, says Ken Tucker, editor at large of Entertainment Weekly. “People want their idols to be authentic.”

• It’s the spiritual solace. “We’re responding to someone who does not have the packaging expected of us, especially women, and in that moment of recognition, people got in touch with something so soulful and spiritual,” says Laurie Sue Brockway, inspiration and family editor of Beliefnet.com. “People felt blessed by that.”

For many, it all comes down to ancient wisdom. Rahn Hasbargen, an accountant in St. Paul, cites John 7:24: “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”

“Never has that verse been explained more dramatically than in the case of Susan Boyle,” Hasbargen says.