I copied the above from a note to myself this morning. It’s been brewing, this post about “god.” Several things give rise to it, one extremely personal, the other what I’m noticing now on the internet.
Personal: I was in the middle of a very important, urgent meeting with two other women the other day, and these words escaped me “Oh Jesus Christ!” Meaning: “That’s so hard to believe!” Or, “Do we really have to put up with that?” Or some such. You get the gist.
Right then, the woman to my left (a new friend of mine) said to me, out of the blue (that’s how I experienced her remark; and I imagine she experienced my remark the same way!) “I wish you would stop saying our Lord’s name in vain.” Or some such. Can’t remember exactly what her first remark was. But she kept going. And I can’t remember any of what she said next, except to make clear to me that she is a church-going person who believes in some version of Christian theology, and so for me to use those words in that way, as she put it, “hurts my heart.” Well that remark I could get behind. Said something like, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt your heart!” Which I certainly did not! Then I added, knowing full well that I probably shouldn’t because it would go nowhere, “I see things differently.” Which offended her all over again, though in a more muted tone, at which point the third woman called us back to the meeting’s agenda.
What I wanted to say to her was that I am spiritual, but not religious. In other words, that I see the entire universe as shot through with the divine.
That spirituality unites, but religions divide.
That religions end up with dogmatic theologies, used way too often to divide us from one another.
Here’s a long tweet that says it all:
BTW: Given the above, what bothers me right now about so many posts on X is how Christianity is being used as the antidote to the satanic hell that, for example the Olympic Opening Ceremony tried to force feed us with. No thank you. I refuse to limit my mind, imagination, or experience of the mysterious divinity in which we are all immersed, and in which “good” and “evil” both have their parts to play, requiring our free will to continuously choose between them.
FYI: I am a recovering Catholic who remembers very well my horror in childhood of thinking my non-Catholic friends would go to hell because they weren’t Catholic.
