Reblog “My Emancipation From American Christianity” By John Pavlovitz

If it seems I’ve dropped off the face of the earth again. In some ways I have. I’m recovering from the passing away of two friends at the end of November, one of them was my closest confidant.

I lost my dear friend Bonnie Balcerzak Caprara. Bonnie was the one I turned to in my darkest hours, she was my nonjudgmental ear when I needed it most. She knew all my “secrets.” She was also one of my biggest cheerleaders, it was her who encouraged me to start this blog, and helped me negotiate the often confusing world of wordpress. She was a regular reader and commentator on this blog (sometimes forgetting she was signed in under the alt she posted one of her blogs under.)

She also was encouraging me to re-visit the work I did years ago on Sex and Spirituality and begin blogging on the subject as well as turning my insights and research into a book on what she saw as an important and possibly healing subject for many.

I had the painful honor of officiating her memorial. (Unfortunately minutes after learning that my neighbor Ron had also passed away.)

So, it’s no surprise that I’m feeling lot of pain right now, and as we go into the holiday season, which coincides with the 20th anniversary of my big Brother’s passing on Christmas Eve, I don’t see this funk leaving me anytime soon (especially without Bonnie to lend me an ear.)

I learned a long time ago to just ride with these things, rather than suppress them and have them come out as rage and/or severe, debilitating depression. One of the keys to battling back from the suicidal depression of 20 years ago was the realization that emotions are like vegetables, they’re mean to be served fresh. Even the ones we perceive as “negative” like anger, or sorrow, or grief. So I’m feeling my feelings and trying to nurture myself through this dark time as best I can.

Anyway, that’s not why I wrote today. Though I wanted folks to know.

I wrote today to  once again share something powerful written by John Pavlovitz. This goes along, I think, with my posting a few weeks ago about defining myself as an atheist… I know longer see God or Christ through the myopic and perversely distorted lens that it has become. A Christianity and a God-view that at it’s most ridiculous declares a red coffee cup to be an attack on it, and where it at it’s most obscene celebrates mass murder at a Planned Parenthood Clinic, or at least turns a silent eye and voice to it (which to me is giving tacit support to it.)

I’m just as tired as John Pavlovitz is. I’m just as angry.

I’m tired of what Christianity has been twisted into, especially in the last 30years here in America.

I’m also  tired of  the damage done over the last 2000 years to my gay brothers and sisters, my Native Brothers and Sisters, my Muslim Brothers and Sisters, my pagan brothers and sisters, my black brothers and sisters.

I’m tired of the  harm that MAN has caused by perverting the teachings of Jesus about a LOVING GOD, about having compassion and who turned Christianity into an anvil to hurt and a prison to oppress.

I too am tired and angry at the arrogance of those on the right, who say you can’t be a liberal and be a Christian. When the version of Christ that they claim to follow has been so twisted and perverted for their own end that it has become just the opposite of what was taught in the gospels.  Only man has the arrogance to supplant a loving God with teachings that contradict HIM.

We got it wrong…for 2,000 years we got it wrong, we’ve warped Jesus’ teachings, especially in America into something ugly, something hurtful. We’ve politicized it for selfish reasons,  we’ve created churches that argue which screwed up interpretation is right, and bludgeon each other with it….We kill in the name of God….In the name of Jesus, and we’re more upset by a coffee up, than poverty, or the obscenity of killing in Jesus name? It’s time to say that’s enough… and start trying to undo the harm our arrogance has done.

I haven’t given up on God, or Jesus…I’ve just given up on the twisted version of it being practiced today, especially here.

And I am no longer giving my tacit approval of it, by staying silent.

Thank you John for once again having the courage to articulate powerfully what so many of us feel.

John Pavlovitz

My Emancipation From American Christianity

 

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