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Dear Friends,
Sunday June 19, 5 pm
Jesus as Shaman a
Healing Father's Day Service.
The lectionary reading for this Sunday is the story of how Jesus healed a man named Legion (Luke 8:26-39) of many demons. Any man who shots and kills 49 people and injures many many more physically and psycho spiritually, like we witnessed this last week in Orlando Florida, is a modern day Legion. We have legions and legions of people who are filled with demons and suffer from mental illness today who are getting no care; people who can buy machine guns legally in this country. Jesus heals Legion in the same way many of the shamans like some of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, we have been studying this last month.
After Jesus heals Legion he says, "Go back home Legion and tell everyone what God has done for you." The Grandmothers say, "We must stop this spiritual blindness, this inability to see and feel the sacred around us... ..we first must face the violence and dig it out....we cannot break the cycle of violence around the world without also healing the perpetrators. the Grandmothers say." Grandmother Counsel the World edited by Carol Schaffer.
(artist of painting to the left unknown)
I was not surprised to hear that this modern day Legion had a police record for beating his wife and then received little or no FOLLOW UP CARE from a friend, a counselor, a doctor, a religious leader, the police, the FBI............One of t
he most significant pieces of news I heard was that a co worker and fellow security guard was interviewed and shared that Modern Legion was filled with hate, for women, LGBT, people of color, many many groups. When the interviewer asked him if he felt guilty he said,
"YES! I feel responsible."
."
This co-worker and security guard of the modern day "Legion" is my hero today, for telling the truth and for FEELING his own responsible. If more people were like him and banded together we could respond and care of the legions and legions of people filled with hate, mental illness and demons. Of course getting care for anyone who is mentally ill is very difficult in our culture here in the USA. I recently tried to get a friend who is an addict, schizophrenic, elderly and living on $ 820 a month better care and I was unsuccessful. Of course if we did not have spend so many of our resources on making war we would have plenty of money to care for the legions of sick people. We are a violent country founded with a cowboy myth of rugged individualism with few people standing up and saying like the security co-worker of Legion, I am responsible when my neighbor is mentally ill.
Many of us long for a father who feels responsible in times of crisis and who will take responsibility to care for the vulnerable and needy. A good father has the loving qualities Jesus modeled and taught. These are qualities often associated with the "divine feminine" which has nothing to do with gender, but are qualities of mercy, caring, nurturing, wisdom, and more. If Jesus had children that makes Mother Mary a Grandmother. Image Jesus and Mary Magdalene as a married co-ministry team who shared sex and children. This is not a historical statement I can defend, but rather the religious story I feel we need to explore for this historic time in order to put in balance the anti body, misogynistic traditions of the church and culture.
Jesus was also a shaman which means he could enter other realms and interact with the spirit world. Shamanism comes from ancient spiritual traditions and we have left out the shamanism of Jesus, but our reading for this Sunday dramatically lifts up Jesus' spiritual shamanic power to heal even those with great suffering. It is past time we celebrate and explore the power of shamanism in Jesus and early Christianity. It is "indigenous" to our religious heritage.
We will do an anointing healing ritual of celebration and gratitude for our fathers, and serve communion. Like Mother's Day too often, we do not tell the truth on Father's Day about all the complex feelings we may experience. Perhaps we always wanted to be a father and never had children, or we are estranged from our kids or from our own father, or our kids are sick or addicted or have died, or we had an abusive father or we need to be honored as a father for all the dedication we have shown to our families and have not felt appreciated. And maybe we are a step father in a complex family web that is hard to navigate. This healing service is dedicated to truth telling and sharing about whatever our experience is as we explore how to honor our fathers more authentically. This Father's Day we invite you to image Jesus as a father and remember Jesus' father Joseph, who like a shaman honored his dreams in order to enable the Christ child to be born. Jesus had an intimate relationship with his God the father or Abba as he called him. He related to God as a personal father or papa God. Now that my own father has been dead many years, I have found that my relationship with him continues to grow and change and I love him more all the time. Increasingly I want to honor him.
We dedicate this worship service to our fathers (and to my father Jesse) to our husbands (and my husband Walt who has been a loving step father to my children) and to all our spiritual fathers (my spiritual father Dr. John B. Cobb Jr. who inspires me, not because he is smart but because he is kind as well as being so smart) and finally to young fathers everywhere (and to my son Ben who is soon to become a father).
We are postponing our Book Group and Worship about Jesus' Third Way due to people being away for summer, but we will begin again in the upcoming months, when we will explore the teachings of Jesus regarding non-violence and we will consider giving up our fight or flight instincts and learn more creative responses to conflict. Walt Winks Jesus and Nonviolence A Third Way is a powerful small 117 page proclamation on a radical way to live in peace. We will develop "Jesus' Third Way" of creative problem solving which demands care for our oppressors and innovative responses that include caring for the conversion of our enemies. Join us for lively and engaging theater improvisations using the ideas of Brazilian theater artist, Augusto Boal and his, Theater of the Oppressed. We will explore our own personal challenges as well as global issues and explore how to use the way of love and "Jesus's Third Way" as we prepare for civil disobedience and radical love of enemies. (Please contact us if you are interested.)
Sunday June 26, 5 pm "Fridalupe" Frida Kahlo has become an international feminsit folk heroine and Our Lady of Guadalupe
has been of course the Black Madonna or Divine Mother of the Americas for generations. Combining them we explore women telling the truth about their pain, betrayals and lack of recognition of their talents. Our Lady holds her and all of us in her love. Together we experience a provocative symbol we will explore. We provide paint crayons and will paint self portraits, during worship. Special thanks to artist Alisa Proctor and her inspired paintings she has allowed us to share in this newsletter. Please look at her beautiful art work on her web site. http://www.alisaproctor.com/
Please contact us, (858) 248-5123, [email protected] and join us for regular services every Sunday at 5 pm at 13014 Calle de Las Rosas, SD, CA 92129 f
ollowed by a soup pot luck, (salad pot luck while our vegetable garden is full of lettuce) in a special place we call the Magdalene Kitchen (for like the early church we always share a meal as part of worship) followed by a bonfire and star gazing and dancing weather permitting. A new kind of home/internet/radio blog church that does not follow the traditions of the church but teaches the teachings of Jesus. A safe place to share of ourselves, our feelings, our dreams, do art work, sing lively non traditional church music, DANCE, enjoy bonfires and soup dinners. A place where everyone is safe and welcome.
Mission Statement
Encouraging awe of creation and the cosmos, we explore the visual and performing arts, dreams, wisdom teachings of Christ-Sophia in the Bible and newly found gospels, prayer, social activism, and relationships as we work to care for our common home Mother Earth, in a new kind of local and global community. We are a home church with people around the world via the Internet, exploring a new religious story for our time.
Vision
Our vision is to spiritually awaken and raise our consciousness about the sacred nature of all life and our interconnectedness in order to come together as a human family and
care
for our common home and love God/dess with all our hearts, souls and minds and creation as ourselves.
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