It was wonderful to be able to share an hour with Mary Hynes of CBC’s Tapestry talking about the challenge and reality of letting go. Mary is a gracious, welcoming host so our conversation was incredibly comfortable and I very much enjoyed it. I’d love your feedback. Here’s the program.
Letting It Go, CBC Tapestry with Mary Hynes
5 Responses
I was intrigued by the discussion so much that I went online to find out more about West Hill United and Gretta Vosper. And because much of what I found there resonated with me, I went to the library today and borrowed the book, With or Without God. Using your analogy in the book, I’ve been one of those people standing in the field, away from the post, maybe a football field away, maybe even sitting on a fence. And it seems like someone is trying to cut down that post, and trying to build a beautiful little cabin, full of light and warmth and love, the kind that I have always wanted, and I’m off the fence and coming over to check it out…
Thank you for that beautiful image, Wendy. I can’t think of a more lovely way to put those old posts to use. Welcome, and may we journey long together.
I am a ‘mature’ student travelling back and forth to college nearly every day which is over an hour and half each way. I have had lots of time to think and reflect on many things and I listen to CBC radio a lot . I especially love Tapestry. I was intrigued to hear of your transformation and how you are still committed to family and community through maintaining a ‘church’ but without all the religious mumbo jumbo. It’s been about 4-5 years since I de-converted from an extreme evangelical / fundamentalist. It began with a couple of questions that my teenage sons asked me, “Why are you so close minded about things like evolution …” another one was “Christians think they’re better than everyone else”. I was defensive at first but then thought, “No, if God really is who I believed he was all these years, then he shouldn’t be afraid of the big questions” From there I decided to find the answers but the answers were NOT what I expected. Another friend challenged me that the bible was just a book written by men at which I balked but after much soul searching and research I came to the honest conclusion that she was right. From there everything unraveled. It has been difficult in many ways and freeing in other ways. Church involvement was huge for me – especially ‘worship’. I miss the community / family type support from church but didn’t know there was a realistic alternative. I love what you are doing. Wish there were more brave enough to do this.
Dear Gretta,
I am a spiritual director living in the Yukon who also has a desire to see a new reform take place in the world of organized religion. I do not identify as Christian and yet I have found myself called and sustained by what I would now term the Christ Love. I felt like I could finally accept this calling after reading Marcus Borg’s book “Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary.” Borg introduced me to the historical Jesus while validating the phenomenon of the Christ Mystery. What I love most about what Borg says about Jesus is that Jesus talked about God as Intimate Reality. Not something to believe in but Something To Experience. I recently facilitated a study of Borg’s book using a workbook by Tim Scorer called “Experiencing Jesus”. Using Tim’s book, I guided a small community of spiritual and intellectual people, some calling themselves Christians, others not, through a months-long discussion that, in short, explored the Mystery of God and how we experience It. I am one who agrees that the Bible has been doctored and that we need to be very careful about our language making us complicit in the destructive domination systems of history and of present day. When I use the word God with a capital G I am referring to a Power Greater than Human Power, an Energy That Never Dies, a Supreme Consciousness, the Condition of Possibility of Any Entity Whatsoever, Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. Yesterday, one of the members of the Jesus Group (our new moniker — we have finished the workbook and are continuing to meet and share as a community of questioning seekers) asked me if I’d heard of you. I had not. He told me about the Tapestry interview. I listened. It brought up a lot of questions and thoughts. I am a person who has experienced in profound, personal ways, an interventionist god. I do not mean I have prayed for a person I have loved to be well and they have become well. I mean I have prayed for strength and received it. I have not prayed for violence to end and it has ended. I have prayed for my selfishness to be removed and been humbled. I have not prayed for someone’s suffering to be taken away and that person has been relieved. I have prayed for courage and been given it. When you witnessed the pain in your daughter you threw away an interventionist god. What if you had, instead, thrown away the temptation to pray for (and teach others to pray for) a god to intervene in our selfish ways? I do not mean to be harsh. By “selfish” I mean only that when we pray for what we want to see happen in the world we are setting ourselves up. If we get what we desire God is great. If we do not God doesn’t exist. What if your daughter had said, “I prayed for my teacher to be well and she died,” and you had responded by encouraging her to re-think the way that she prays? Perhaps instead of throwing out God because God doesn’t answer prayers the way we think they ought to be answered we could instead learn to pray only for the strength to feel our pain, experience our depth of human suffering with grace and courage, ride this wave of profound grief that we are subject to as human beings. What if instead of praying, “Do this for me so I and they don’t have to suffer,” we pray to know deeply the Intimate Reality, the Presence of Love during these dark times? We pray for what we want and we don’t get it so there is no interventionist god. What if your daughter’s teacher had lived? Would you have become an atheist? Or would you have said, “Prayer works,”? We are so arrogant! Whatever this God is, It clearly doesn’t perform according to how we think It ought and so, frustrated, we change our belief. If God is Something To Be Experienced rather that to be believed in, then I am a fool to expect that this Power will make people well when I ask It to. But I am wise to experience this Power intervening when, through Silence, and listening, and conscious contact, I am transformed. I am wise to adjust my prayers from “Intervene and make things the way I would like them to be so I and others do not have to suffer” to “Intervene and strengthen me to endure the suffering I feel as a powerless human.” Then keep the eyes and the ears open for the intervention to take place. Because it will. And does. Not in ways that align with my will but in ways that astonish and change and resurrect the selfish and self-centered being that I humbly am.
Yours,
Celia McBride
Celia,
To comment on your comments I have copied yours and put in asterisks – then my comments.
You stated “I am one who agrees that the Bible has been doctored and that we need to be very careful about our language making us complicit in the destructive domination systems of history and of present day.”
Most people don’t seem to realize that our New Testament is a compilation of writings written by many people. Who decided that those writings and not others should be classified as correct? The people who did that argued among themselves as to which books belonged in the Bible. They certainly didn’t have a prophet to tell them which was correct and which wasn’t. It is very possible that some got left out that should be there. I think the councils of Nicea and Constantinople that decided many things including the Trinitarian doctrine were NOT inspired. It was a political game – and I don’t believe the truth won.
You state: “I am a person who has experienced in profound, personal ways, an interventionist god. I do not mean I have prayed for a person I have loved to be well and they have become well. I mean I have prayed for strength and received it. I have not prayed for violence to end and it has ended. I have prayed for my selfishness to be removed and been humbled.”
I think you have captured the very essence of how we really ought to pray. I think most of us think like children when it comes to prayer. We think that because we went to our parents as a child and got what we asked that we can do likewise with God. Too many people believe that God should intervene when they really don’t understand that if He does intervene then that intervention possibly destroys something priceless that God has given us. I think one of the greatest gifts God has given us is the right to choose. However, in doing that, He has to stand by and watch terrible things happen because some choose to use their right to choose by choosing evil.
Many people ask – why would a loving Heavenly Father allow atrocities to happen? I believe that God allows those things to happen because there actually will be a judgment and we will be held accountable for the things we do. If God was to always intervene so that evil never happened there is no accountability, there is no purpose in Christ’s suffering. The reason Christ suffered was to pay for your bad deeds and mine – conditional however on our acceptance and following of Christ. He said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” Those that don’t keep His commandments, don’t love Him, and will not be forgiven of their misdeeds and will have to suffer for those misdeeds just as you punish a child that doesn’t change.
However, I have participated in what you might call miracles as I have placed my hands on my children’s heads when ill and had some remarkable things happen.
You stated, “We are so arrogant! Whatever this God is, It clearly doesn’t perform according to how we think It ought and so, frustrated, we change our belief.”
But your comment on prayer is so true! In the Old Testament there is a verse that says, “My ways are not your ways, and my thoughts are not your thoughts, but as the Heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts” This is what I find is the problem with much of Gretta’s teaching and the same for all atheists. Like the Russians when their first spaceship went into outer space they declared there was no god because they didn’t see him.
Why would God make Himself known to either the Russians or Gretta? Like it or not, there are rules to finding God. You must search for truth and when you find what you think is truth you must ask God if it is in humility, as a child asks a parent. When answers come, they come as a feeling of peace or warm feeling and you know. I can’t explain how I know – I just do. I know from personal experiences that God lives, that the stories in the New Testament are real because I have experienced similar experiences.
In James it says “If any of you lack wisdom (is there any of us that doesn’t lack wisdom) let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.
You don’t just ask God and think “So God – proove it!”. You have to ask in faith like a child asks (there’s the hard part – but you could say that’s a strong desire to know along with a willingness to accept, to be believing). But faith implies you are willing to live what you do know to the best of your ability in order to obtain an answer.
As Celia says, “keep the eyes and the ears open for the intervention to take place. Because it will. And does. Not in ways that align with my will but in ways that astonish and change and resurrect the selfish and self-centered being that I humbly am.” Excellent and thoughtful comments. That is the truth.
Comments are closed.