Tag: Homilies for Progressives

The Profound Miracle a Marianne Williamson Presidency Would Bring About (Sunday Homily)

Readings for 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time: GN 18:20-32; PS 138: 1-8; COL 2:12-14; LK 11:1-13

Today’s readings are about the role of prayer in changing consciousness. On this topic, they share with us the understandings of Abraham, the Psalmist (sometimes called David), Paul of Tarsus, John the Baptist, and Jesus himself.

As you’ll see immediately below, all of the readings address changing our ideas about God from the One who punishes and kills to a merciful Father who wants us to be happy. The readings are about God’s mercy towards enemies and kindness to strangers. They’re about persistence, generosity, abundance, about sharing bread, eggs, and fish – and about debt forgiveness. As always, in a Christian context, they explain the New World Order that Jesus called the Kingdom of God.

In this (over-long) election season, I can’t help but make the connection between those readings about prayer and its mind-changing power on the one hand, and the candidacy of Marianne Williamson on the other. That’s because Marianne is the most prayerful spiritual leader I’ve come across in my lifetime of engagement with theology and with people attempting to connect with the Reality that some still call “God.” As such, Marianne’s candidacy credibly promises to change world consciousness from one dominated by fear and necrophilia to one characterized by forgiveness and reverence for life. I’ll explain how in a minute.

Today’s Readings

However, before I get to that, here are my “translations” of today’s readings about the miraculous power of prayer even as exemplified by Ms. Williamson and the great biblical figures just mentioned. Please check here to see if they coincide with your own understandings: 


 GN 18: 20-32
  
 Sheik Abraham,
 The product
 Of bedouin violence,
 Comes gradually to understand
 That Yahweh listens
 To prayers
 On behalf of innocents
 Otherwise lost
 As collateral damage
 In mayhem
 Inspired by
 Tribal lust
 For war. 
  
 PS 138: 1-8
 
 Yahweh, then,
 Is not vengeful
 But kind and truthful,
 Close to the lowly
 And far from the proud
 Protecting his petitioners
 And saving them
 From those who 
 Would do them harm.
  
 Col 2: 12-14
 
 Thank you, Jesus,
 For freeing us from
 The world’s lie
 That we are condemned
 By a necrophilic God 
 And morbid legal system
 Instead of freed
 By One
 Who forgives
 And offers us 
 An entirely new 
 Way of Life."
  
  
 LK 11: 1-13
 
 To get there,
 Jesus taught his friends
 The prayer of his mentor,
 John the Baptist:
 “May God’s Kingdom
 Come soon
 With its abundant daily bread
 And the same mercy
 (And debt forgiveness!)
 That Abraham 
 Came to understand.”
 In God’s New Order,
 And despite human reluctance
 (And the midnight hour)
 Bread, eggs and fish 
 Will be shared 
 Even with inconvenient 
 And rudely persistent visitors
 In God’s Holy Spirit
 That enables it all.

The Marianne Connection

Those readings about prayer evoke reflections on the candidacy of Marianne Williamson. As I was saying, I’ve never come across a person who so naturally, easily, and comfortably prays. Unabashedly, she invokes miracles one after another – just what we need in these troubled times.

But please note this: for Marianne Williamson, “miracles” do not refer to woo-woo magic events “out there” contrary to the laws of nature. Instead, they are profound interior changes in consciousness just like the one experienced by Abraham in that reading from Genesis.

And change in consciousness is precisely what we need in these times of overriding threat from systems-induced climate chaos, from nuclear war, and from the underlying fears and insecurities fostered by “leaders” such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Manuel Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro and the other fascist heads of state.

With those monsters in mind, I’m driven to imagine how a Marianne Williamson presidency would change planetary (yes planetary!) thinking from processes governed by fear embodied in those men, by (mostly state) terrorism – a specifically fear-inducing tactic – to one governed by love and reverence for life.

The miraculous change intimately connected to today’s topic of prayer, would go something like this: 

  • On Marianne’s accession to the presidency (actually, long before), the entire world would scour her books for clues to her real identity – just as they did with President Obama’s Dreams from My Father and with Mr. Trump’s The Art of the Deal.
  • Some would read Marianne’s spiritual guidebook, A Course in Miracles (ACIM) or (more likely) what Marianne describes as her ACIM CliffsNotes, A Return to Love.
  • Others would even take up the daily discipline described in ACIM’s volume II, A Workbook for Students.
  • In any case, the resulting analysis, commentary and direct experience would get people everywhere discussing ACIM’s basic ideas with the same fervor currently given to Mr. Trump’s “fake news” and “alternative fact.”  Those ACIM ideas hold that:  
  1. Our world of fear-induced violence is a completely human fabrication making Americans in particular (as Chris Hedges puts it) “the most illusioned people on earth.”
  2. No one is actually attacking us. Instead, according to Marianne’s analysis, most of the world’s violence is induced by an economic system that financially rewards human destruction fostered by the Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, and Big Oil. In other words, capitalism-as-we-know-it is our enemy including its ideological defenses.
  3. The way out of the resulting morass is forgiveness. That is, we must realize that the ones our culture habitually blames are actually innocent. Our problems are not caused by immigrants, non-whites, LGBTQQIAs, not by the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Syrians, Libyans, Somalis, Iraqis, Iranians, Yemenis . . . Forgiveness means accepting the fact that all of those just mentioned are not only our sisters and brothers. THEY ARE OURSELVES. Or as ACIM puts it, “There is really only one of us here.”
  4. Such forgiveness leads to atonement – to At-One-Ment, i.e. to specific policies reflecting the unity that exists between human beings and between humans and nature. Policies include reparations to the descendants of African slaves, to Native Americans, and to countries whose economies and cultures have been destroyed by imperialist wars encouraged by capitalism-as-we-know-it. Atonement with Mother Nature includes a Green New Deal.   

Conclusion

When Marianne Williamson is asked about her inexperience as a politician, she invariably invokes Franklin Roosevelt who said that the primary role of the presidency is not governmental management, but moral leadership. In fact, once elected, presidents can turn over day-to-day policy management to carefully chosen experts in each relevant field.

Moreover, the policies in question will end up virtually the same under any of the Democratic candidates all of whom claim to be “progressive.” They’ll all hire similar technocrats to implement Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, $15.00 minimum wage, and forgiveness of college loans. Except for Marianne and Tulsi Gabbard, with their emphasis on peace-building and military disengagement, all the candidates promise to support the same tired U.S. foreign policy.

Besides such crucial peace-building emphasis, what really separates the twenty or so candidates are their character, credibility, and personal values that will enable them to change the national and international conversation.

In a perverse way, Donald Trump has actually demonstrated the importance of character traits in the oval office. Think about it. In Trump we have a nihilist of questionable intellectual competence, completely without moral principle and with virtually no understanding of policy, how Washington runs, or even of basic history or geography.

And yet, Trump has changed the tenor of the national and international conversation more profoundly than any formally educated nihilist philosopher possibly could. He has literally reshaped the world by giving courage to fascists, racists, homophobes and misogynists of all stripes everywhere in the world.

What our liturgical readings for the day suggest (at least to me) is that Marianne Williamson’s life-long commitment to prayerful change in consciousness equips her better than anyone else not simply to return the world to normality after the Trump disaster. She can do more than that. She can move the entire world to the unprecedentedly deeper level of consciousness that our times and impending disasters require.

Marianne’s mindset represents what’s really required to implement the values of love, forgiveness, generosity and at-one-ment that we’ve read about today. They are precisely the values required by our desperate times. Implementing those values world-wide is the profound miracle a Williamson presidency could bring about.  

Jesus Was a Radical Feminist: Homily for 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Bleeding Woman

Sunday’s Readings: Wisdom 1:13-16, 2:23-24; Ps. 30:2, 4-6, 11-13; 2Cor. 8:7, 9, 13-16; Mk. 5:21-43

My wife, Peggy, is a radical feminist. As director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Berea College in Kentucky, she has always been so.

Whenever we discuss world issues, my tendency is to trace their roots to capitalism. Peggy’s is to find their origins in patriarchy. Capitalism itself, she says, is founded on patriarchy. Until we realize that and address the influence of patriarchy, nothing can really change.

She goes on. Ironically, patriarchy has men making decisions for women on issues that impact females much more directly than males – matters such as contraception, maternity leave, funding for childcare, abortion, wage disparity between men and women, the Equal Rights Amendment, and wages for housework. All of that, she adds, has to change.

I find Peggy’s logic and criticism compelling. This morning’s gospel reading indicates that Jesus would too.

In fact, the gospels in general show Jesus himself to be a radical feminist. In addressing specifically female issues, he favored women who spoke for themselves and courageously exercised their own initiative. Jesus even praised women who disobeyed laws aimed against them precisely as women. He ended up preferring the disobedient ones to females who were passive captives of the religious patriarchy. To repeat: we find an example of such radical feminism on the part of Jesus in today’s reading from the Mark’s gospel.

First of all, consider Mark’s literary strategy. In today’s reading he creates a “literary sandwich” – a “story within a story.” The device focuses on two kinds of females within the Jewish faith of Jesus’ day. In fact, Mark’s gospel is liberally sprinkled with doublets like the one just described. When they appear, both stories are meant to play off one another and illuminate each other.

In today’s doublet, we find two women. One is just entering puberty at the age of 12; the other has had a menstrual problem for the entire life span of the adolescent girl. (Today we’d call her condition a kind of menorrhagia.) So, to begin with the number 12 is centralized. It’s a literary “marker” suggesting that the narrative has something to do with the twelve tribes of Israel – and in the early church, with the apostolic leadership of “the twelve.” The connection with Israel is confirmed by the fact that the 12-year old in the story is the daughter of a synagogue official. As a man in a patriarchal culture, he can approach Jesus directly and speak for his daughter.

The other woman in the doublet has no man to speak for her; she has to approach Jesus covertly and on her own. She comes from the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum from the 12-year old daughter of the synagogue leader. The older woman is without honor. She is poor and penniless. Her menstrual problem has rendered her sterile, and so she’s considered technically dead by her faith community.

Her condition has also excluded her from the synagogue. In the eyes of community leaders like Jairus, the petitioning father in the story, she is “unclean.” (Remember that according to Jewish law, all women were considered unclean during their monthly period. So, the woman in today’s drama is exceedingly unclean. She and all menstruating women were not to be touched.)

All of that means that Jairus as a synagogue leader is in effect the patriarchal oppressor of the second woman. On top of that, the older woman in the story has been humiliated, exploited, and impoverished by the male medical profession which has been ineffective in addressing her condition.

In other words, the second woman is the victim of a misogynist religious system which, by the way, saw the blood of animals as valuable and pleasing in God’s eyes, but the blood of women as repulsively unclean.

Nonetheless, it is the bleeding woman who turns out to be the hero of the story. Her faith is so strong that she believes a mere touch of Jesus’ garment will suffice to restore her to life, and that her action won’t even be noticed. So, she reaches out and touches the Master. Doing so was extremely bold and highly disobedient to Jewish law, since her touch would have rendered Jesus himself unclean. She refuses to believe that.

Instead of being made unclean by the woman’s touch, Jesus’ being responds by exuding healing power, apparently without his even being aware. The woman is cured. Jesus asks, “Who touched me?” The disciples object, “What do you mean? Everybody’s touching you,” they say.

Finally, the unclean woman is identified. Jesus praises her faith and (significantly!) calls her “daughter.” (What we therefore end up finding in this literary doublet are two Jewish “daughters” – yet another point of comparison.)

While Jesus is attending to the bleeding woman, the first daughter in the story apparently dies. Jesus insists on seeing her anyhow. When he observes that she is merely asleep, the bystanders laugh him to scorn. But Jesus is right. When he speaks to her in Aramaic, the girl awakens and is hungry. Mark records Jesus’ actual words. The Master says, “Talitha Kumi,” i.e. “Wake up!” Everyone is astonished, and Jesus has to remind them to feed her.

What does all the comparison mean? The doublet represented in today’s Gospel addresses issues that couldn’t be more female – more feminist. The message here is that bold and active women unafraid of disobeying the religious patriarchy will save our world from death. It will awaken us from our death-like slumber.
“Believe and act like the bleeding woman” is the message of today’s Gospel. “Otherwise our world will be for all practical purposes dead.”

Could this possibly mean that feminist faith like that of the hero in today’s Gospel will ultimately be our salvation from patriarchy? Is our reading calling us to a world led by women rather than the elderly, white, out-of-touch men who overwhelmingly claim hold elective office?

My Peggy would say yes.

Today’s Gospel, she would say, suggests that it’s time for men to stop telling women how to be women – to stop pronouncing on issues of female sexuality whether it be menstruation, abortion, contraception, same-sex attractions, or whether women are called by God to the priesthood.

Correspondingly, it’s time for women to disobey such male pronouncements, and to exercise leadership in accord with their common sense – in accord with women’s ways of knowing. Only that will save our world which is currently sick unto death.

Talitha Kumi! It’s time to wake up.