Why you should meditate

Here, but understand I’m a big ol’ hypocrite for posting this because I have never successfully quieted my mind enough to do this very thing.

I see the point. I really, really do. I listen to friends talk about the life-long benefits of meditating, and they seem so centered. Or something.

But. But. But.

Getty Images

We love us some babies

Write your own caption.

The reality of unspoken expectations

I am neither a basketball coach nor a pastor, but this essay over at internetmonk.com is intriguing on several levels. I have made friends with clergy in several faith groups — partly from my days at Hartford Seminary and partly because clergy members throw the best parties — and one told me a story of his introduction to a rather historic church here in staid old New England.

He’d moved up from Florida, and wore a small gold chain (very small) and several of the members of his church wasted no time suggesting he might want to lose the gold. New England clergy, evidently, don’t wear gold chains. Who knew?

The essay also reminded me of a job I had once, where the whole endeavor seemed to be filled with invisible hoops I was expected to both sense, and jump through. Hated that job. Hated it.

Getty Images

Heaven for everyone

The gospel according to Queen. And once again, thank you, Bro. Tod.

How to talk to a fundamentalist

Here, by Dan Barker, former fundamentalist and now co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

(And no, you don’t need a whip and a chair. We’re basically harmless, I promise, but a recent correspondence I had with one of my own kind made me remember that there are rules of engagement.)

Getty Images

The church as community

Frank Viola discusses shared lives — like the lives of the members of  the early church. Dare we say it was church-sponsored socialism? Or even communism? Was the early church an example of successful communism, where people shared everything with one another?

Or was it something else, like the intentional communities of people like the Catholic Workers?

In God’s house are many trailer parks

More on Antsy McClain and — as always — thank you, Bro. Tod.

God said it, I believe it, and that’s confusing

Actually, the bumper sticker popular around my hometown was “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”

Even as a girl, I thought this was a little sad. What if your interpretation of what God said turns out to be wrong? What if God said precisely the opposite of what you thought? Then what? Do you scrape off the bumper sticker, or do you edit it in some way, maybe make it “I thought God said it and I did believe it, but now I’m pretty sure I was wrong.”

I’ve just said no thank you to a nice man who is still a member of my church and e-mailed me to ask me to explain “Dating Jesus.” He’s offered to buy the book as a study guide for how I’ve wandered from my old theology. To show his bonafides, I think, he let me know he’s taught Sunday school and filled in as an elder and a deacon at church, so I let him know that I’ve taught Sunday school (and bus ministries), too, but given my gender, the church wouldn’t allow me to build my spiritual resume to be as impressive as his.

My brother once said that a fundamentalist’s style of arguing goes thus: We hit ‘em hard, we hit ‘em fast, and then we leave ‘em to bleed out on the floor. I know the theology of my church — intimately — and, speaking as a trained fundamentalist, I know how fruitless it is to try to enage someone like me in an argument. Not to brag, but we make fabulous lawyers. We take our literalist and legalistic minds and we chew through debate.

The man asked if I was a wall (a closed mind) or a jar of clay (willing to change). I told him that I’m betting my immortal soul that God never intended a separate and unequal world for the genders.

Does that make me a wall?

He responded that he’s known plenty of women who have grown up to be writers and teachers of other women within the church. So if I would be happy talking to women, surely I can come on home. But that church is not my home. It stopped being my home years ago, when the questions I kept asking about girls and women and boys and men could not be answered.

I emphatically did not write “Dating Jesus” to encourage people to leave their church. If you’re happy where you’ve landed, rock on. But if you’re sitting in a pew with your hands balled into fists, or if you’re not sitting in a pew because you’re just too angry to even try, then try to think of that discomfort as your still small voice telling you your theology is out there.

So here is my prayer: When we die, we go to heaven and find that God is a big African American lesbian covered in tattoos and piercings who opens her wide arms and says, “Come on in, darlin’.” I can’t speak for the gentleman with whom I corresponded, but I know there are certain members of my tribe who will take one look, and then they’ll turn around and march straight to hell, so fearful they are of thinking of the holy as feminine.

Bless their hearts. I think I just unsold a book.

Getty Images

So you’re thinking of selling your soul

To the Devil, that is.

Is it possible? Dr. Faustus did it. So did Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo. Some might say Judas did, too.

Alone but not lonely

Eight years after her husband died, writer Lea Lane is still alone, and here are some reasons why.

Ever notice how single people sometimes make coupled people uncomfortable? Like couple people are wondering what they’re missing?