Tag: Bible

Me and Jeremiah

Me and Jeremiah

Anti-abortion evangelical Christians use the scriptural, “The Call of Jeremiah” to defend their idea of fetal viability at conception. It goes something like this:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…”

Frankly, those words take my breath away. I believe in a higher power most days and simple words like those give life to the marrow of my dry old bones. I can feel their power shimmy up and down my spine. My life has meaning if for just one moment of each day I know that spirit, that entity, whom I sometimes call God, has known my name since the beginning of time. 

Nothing in those words equates to the government denying women (and men) the right to choose when they wish to become parents. 

Christian mystic Richard Rohr teaches “The marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment—not “proof” or certainty!” He says we don’t read for information but for transformation.

I’m not meant to get explanations from scriptures on how to support my point of view. I’m meant to be astonished. On more days than not, I accept the mystery and power of that astonishment without explanation, without questions, without answers. On some days, like when my body needs medical attention, I dig for certainty and absolutes, even demand them. I throw the spirit of mystery out the window and root around in the soil of black-and-white thinking.

Every week this summer I wake up feeling like Supreme Courts-federal and state—are bludgeoning me with a baseball bat. Their traditionalist interpretation of the Constitution coincides with literal  interpretations of the Bible. Prayer in the schools. Public funding of religious education. Dismantling the administrative state of consumer & climate change protections. The license to freely carry any weapons anywhere. Denying reproductive freedom. These and other contrivances are biblically-based ideas embraced by 41% of Americans who believe Jesus will descend on Earth in the flesh by 2050. Yeah. Really.

Christian zealots in every age have found signs that we are in the end-times as described in the Book of Revelation. In my twenties I belonged to a cult that looked for modern signs of the Apocalypse. We were convinced the arrival of branch banking and credit cards signaled the end was near. Globalism was then, as now, a sign. If we had today’s Supreme Court, they’d take up consideration of banning those. The World Council of Churches constituted a fulfillment of the end-times prophecy of a one-world religion. Ecumenism was shunned since it relegated Christianity an equal to other religions. I escaped that cult with a staggering amount of information that took years to dump. 

Now comes word  about how excited the 41% religious warriors are about the war in Ukraine—another fulfillment of the prophecy of the second coming of Christ. 

I know. I know. Who would believe such wacky stuff?

But is it such a leap from my belief that my existence was known eons before I was born? 

How I Do Without Hate

As a reward for living through every day since November 8, 2016, I look to Haagen Dazs Dulce de Leche. Each day I try to do without hate. But I judge each day’s news as the worst thing I ever heard. Every. Single. Day. A bit of solace comes briefly through a pint of ice cream.

Doing without ice cream when the emotional alarms clang requires me to Hold myself tight for fear my limbs, my tongue, my head will whirly-gig out of control and irreparably damage my spirit-mind, not to mention my friendships. The Hold relaxes briefly with one simple pint. And then I do without until the wind gusts the whirly-gig back into motion.

Holding myself together generates an inward turn I take without looking both ways. I involuntarily drive straight to the core where I look for Jesus. From 2003-2011 I worked in Cook County government with a lively crew where the listening was easy. I belonged there, with cultures other than mine. God manifested himself through black and brown christs who spoke of Him: Have a Blest Day, Stay Prayerful, Jesus Loves You. Whenever the bosses above dumped demons into my serenity, Big Jim appeared and quietly laid a copy of a page from the Bible on my desk with a comforting Jesus quote circled in red. John 8:10 I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me won’t walk in darkness but will have the light of life.

The Catholic nuns gave me Jesus in grade school. He walked beside me like an imaginary floppy-eared bunny. As a newly-formed adult I moved from certainty about God and his Son to doubt. Preachers told me to welcome doubt, to throw certainty out with the th-6evening garbage, that doubting God strengthens faith. And it did. Until I started doing my own version of God. I built a periodic table of spiritual elements with blocks of God-info such as heaven and hell don’t exist and Jesus’ Resurrection is simply a symbol of renewed life. Trouble is, I silently scorned those who didn’t believe as I did. When I first met my co-workers I held a colonizing view of their beliefs. Over time my religious formulas fell in the trash heap. As slave descendants, they daily transformed their passed-down spiritual trauma into “I believe.”

Now in my own spiritual trauma I yearn for the comforting words of Big Jim and Shunice, for them to assure me Jesus loves us, all of us, including the remnants of the November 8, 2016 tragedy. I look for faith in my post-work world but Jesus is subtly tucked in for the night. My white-only community seems embarrassed, even ashamed to mention His name.

Well, I miss Him, miss talking about Him, miss Him talking to me through the kindness
and courage of my old work friends. A pint of ice cream doesn’t fill the void but it will do to keep the whirly-gig still until the Floppy-Eared Bunny wakes me in the morning.

Acting Against Type

Acting Against Type

Sitting in my church pew for the last 45 years I’ve heard from time to time that characters in the Old Testament are types of Christ. For instance, the Jonah story — spending three days and nights in the belly of a whale before the big fish spat him out on the beach is a type of Christ because the tale is a foretelling of Jesus spending three days in hell after he died, then emerging from his tomb onto the shores of Christianity. I don’t know why all this typology is necessary to connect the Old Testament to the New or, for that matter, what it has to do with me.

Grandpa Bill Burke

I suspect looking to the past to explain the present is a natural phenomenon, one we’ve used to nail each generation’s stake in the Oregon Trail of human history. Christian typology fortifies this grand obsession. Just as actors fruitlessly try to escape typecasting by choosing roles that are opposite their types, we cannot escape the age-old pull of seeing signs of our type in those who’ve gone before us.

A cousin named Barb Violi found me a few years ago through FaceBook. My father had spoken of his sister once or twice, but  he never mentioned she had children, or that he visited them in Memphis from time to time. When I visited Barb for the first time in her home in Omaha last month, she shouted, “Oh my God, you look just like Grandpa.”

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Barb Violi with Zoe & Louie

Looking for signs of my type in them, I was hungry for Barb’s memories about Grandpa and our other relatives. There were a few similarities in the dead forebears but nothing like that of Barb herself who is a rabid Democrat, cultivates indoor geraniums, loves her Scottish Terriers, swims and rides her bicycle and has art-covered walls. Her yard is full of birdhouses and flamingo planters. We are the same type

Barb told me our grandmother’s name was Katherine. My father was the type who kept secrets. He’d never mentioned her. She was killed in a car accident when he was a toddler in Terre Haute. My son unwittingly named his daughter Katherine with no knowledge of his great-grandmother’s name. My father’s father, whose looks I favor, had a girlfriend, Stacy, whom my father secretly visited in Indianapolis. My father named his youngest daughter, my sister, Stacy. My mother, who was an east-coast snob, couldn’t have known the connection because she would never have stood for naming Stacy after anyone connected to my father. Barb disclosed that most of my father’s relatives were not the drinking type. My mother found non-drinkers the ultimate in lower life forms. The only thing lower: Midwesterners.

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The Midwest

I keep looking for some ancestral typecasting to blame for my body shape, my alcoholism, my arthritis, my murderous thoughts. Jesus and Buddha both taught that we are who we are in the moment, unyoked from the past or the future.

Adhering to this spiritual axiom requires me to act against type.

Does Anyone Really Like to Read This Stuff?

Does Anyone Really Like to Read This Stuff?

From the backseat of my earliest memories I hear, “Why did God make me? God made me to know Him and to serve Him in this world and the next.” It’s the first lesson I memorized in Catholic grade school, before I could even read. Sometime in my early life I heard about the Bible but our religious lessons were taught from the Baltimore Catechism with no mention of the Bible. Nuns told me Jesus was my friend, but never cited Scripture to back up the claim. Some have said the Church of Rome never wanted the Flock to read the Bible lest they start thinking for themselves, rather than having their theology managed by priests.

UnknownAt Sacred Heart Academy the high schoolers were graded on their verbatim delivery of the 1700-word Passion of Christ from the Gospel of John. Seventh graders were required to sit through a recitation of the Passion as part of Religion class. I never listened at Sunday Mass, so my first hearing of Bible passages was the torture and execution of my friend Jesus. These bloodcurdling passages sparked a morbid curiosity about the rest of the Bible, but I didn’t have a Bible to read on my own. My parents, indwelled with a long lineage of Irish-Catholic hatred for non-Catholics, refused to have a Bible in the house “like those Protestants.”

I borrowed a Bible when I enrolled in a Bible course, part of the initiation rites of the born-again cult I belonged to in the 1970’s. The elders used Scriptural passages to confront me and my live-in, abusive boyfriend with an ultimatum to either marry or separate. We chose marriage because neither of us could face life without sex. For a wedding gift, we received a gilt-edged Harper’s Study Bible, inscribed in gold, with my name misspelled (Reagen). Owning the Bible exalted me into the fellowship I craved, and I feverishly used that Bible for the next three years, marking the margins with exclamatory words, folding over pages and bookmarking meaningful passages.

I didn’t reject the Bible when I left the cult, rather I never liked the Bible and was even repulsed by it. Aside from my own bad experiences with it, the Bible’s first book, Genesis, talks of God creating Paradise and throwing out the first humans because they wanted toth be gods themselves (who wouldn’t?). Then, that couple had two boys and one of them killed the other. Most of the rest of the Old Testament describes violent gangs warring over territory, an angry God, and thousands of flawed people wandering in the desert.

In February 2013, I heard Catholic contemplative Richard Rohr say to 1,500 retreat-goers that Bible stories are myths to provide insight into human nature. The simple transformative act of spiritual hearing jolted me into a surprising love for reading the Bible—the same Bible that has been there all along.

Are We Getting Dragged Into Their Holy War?

Hal Lindsey’s end-times prophecies in The Late, Great Planet Earth, permeated the born-again, religious cult I joined in the early 1970’s in Toms River, New Jersey. There were about fifty of us—disparate spiritual seekers who accepted Jesus Christ as our personal the_late_great_planet_earth_coversavior, a requirement for inclusion in the exclusive Fellowship. One of the elders had broken away from a local Plymouth Brethren Church and opened the basement of his family’s large, wooded, colonial home for Bible study and Sunday services for us blue-jeaned recovering addicts and alcoholics. As a newly sobered-up ex-hippie, full of self-loathing, all I wanted was to be accepted in that Fellowship.

Based on his interpretations of the Book of Revelations, Lindsey’s book sensationalized end-of-the-world Biblical prophecies connecting them to current events as proof of the coming Rapture where Christians would be taken up to heaven and avoid Armageddon. Satan’s plans to form a one-world government and religion, as prophesied, were triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the World Council of Churches—both in 1948. Everywhere I looked in those days I saw Lindsey’s signs of the end times: increase in the divorce rate, recreational drugs, new technology, the gasoline shortage, religious ecumenism, and the birth of the European Union.

Church elders directed every aspect of our lives. Men were the head of the household, women submitted to them and didn’t work. We lived in separate homes but were discouraged from socializing outside the Fellowship, lest we be influenced by secular humanist ideas, like having credit cards, one of Satan’s tools to create a global economy. We didn’t put our money in The Bank of America because the bank was seeking to legalize interstate branch banking, thereby centralizing all the country’s money into a single entity, another Satanic plan.

When my son joined Little League in the first grade, I sat away from the other parents in the bleachers fearing the wrath of God if I talked to anyone outside of the Fellowship. Church members scorned me for volunteering for Jimmy Carter for President in 1976, even though he was born-again.

After four years, I extricated myself from the Fellowship, left my abusive husband in New Jersey and drove my nine-year-old son 800 miles west to Chicago for a new life. A group of Christians at LaSalle Street Church who had experienced similar religious cults nursed me back to spiritual and emotional health. The ideas of Hal Lindsey dissipated into the ether of bad dreams and gradually I no longer looked for signs of the end times.

Until now.

President Trump in his first speech to the Joint Congress announced he was not the President of the world, rather the President of us Americans.

These words, and words of White House strategist Steve Bannon announcing a nationalistic government free from links to other countries remind me of Hal Lindsey’s warning to resist Satan’s plans for a global economy and one-world government.

Are they fighting a holy war?

signs28_title
http://1timothy4-13.com/files/prophecy/signs28.html

Continue reading “Are We Getting Dragged Into Their Holy War?” →

My Secret Years

My Secret Years

The Secret Years by Regan Burke

It’s been 40 years since I left the marriage. I had been sober for almost a year, he for three. We met in Alcoholics Anonymous. I was a hippie and he had been in the Army during the Korean War. We told ourselves we’d bridge our generational, cultural and intellectual divide with love. I brought my delightful six-year-old son, Joe, into the marriage.

A small group of spiritual seekers in AA brought us to a cozy bible study that recruited
prospective believers to a Sunday service replete with emotional, old-fashioned hymns. I made deep friendships there. Kind and accepting fellowship was new to me. I’d grown up thinking sarcastic banter and raging all-night arguments with ever-present booze qualified as chit-chat. My addiction got off to an early start as the legal drinking age was not adhered to in my family.

When I got sober, I hungered for a new family with a clear consistent recipe for living. I easily succumbed to the succor of an evangelical Christian cult. This authoritarian, bible-thumping church required women to submit to their husbands – even when the husbands battered the wives. I returned every time to a husband who tried to smack me into the kind of wife he saw in his neighborhood growing up. I craved God’s love through the approval of the church elders but I had a wild, willful, rule-breaking past that was hard to tame, no matter how hard my husband tried. To this day, the congenial backslapping that people use to emphasize the punchline of their stories, can trigger in me a subconscious fight-or-flight response.

th-1The day of the fight, I raged around the house rattling anything in my path when I discovered the husband had walked out with our joint checkbook. He was going to drain the account. I climbed into my 1963 Volkswagen bus and headed to the bank. There he was in the strip mall parking lot slinking into his 1970 Ford Mustang. I floored my van and slammed right into the back of his Mustang. He tore out down the two-lane highway. I pursued him, crashing into him every time he slowed down.

Eventually I was able to get up enough steam to bulldoze him off the road and cram him into a tree. The impact forced all the doors in the van to fly open, but otherwise there wasth-2 no damage to me or my vehicle. I turned around and drove the speed limit home, parked my van, went inside and fell into bed, believing I had killed him. I slipped into a deep sleep relieved from the cares of all the world.

I was awakened by two elders from the church. The husband escaped unharmed.They had spoken to the police, vouched for my good character and vowed to admit me to a mental institution immediately. No charges were filed. I spent three months in the Christian Health Care Center in Wyckoff, NJ. My son Joe stayed with a church family. The marriage lasted another two years.