Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category

Bodhisattvas, the Burning Bush or My Ghanaian Cousin: what’s your image of God?

December 24, 2012

Especially at Christmastime, we do a lot of reflecting on the trappings of faith – and the appearance of God.

This essay is adapted from an earlier blog post.

“I’ve Got My Own Religion” read a small pamphlet I found on the bus. According to my best guess, it has a Greek Orthodox priest, a woman in a burqa, a Buddhist monk, and a lady with some kind of cross wrapped in twine (a Wiccan, perhaps?).  Their friendly smiles make the part about the lake of fire, inside the pamphlet, all that much more painful.

“It is not true that all religious beliefs are of equal value,” the booklet explains. “Jesus Christ claims to be the truth. He did not say ‘I am a way,’ but rather, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me’ (John 14:6).”

To me, expecting these tracts to convert devout non-Christians seems a bit like believing that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would clamor for American citizenship if he picked up materials declaring that the US Constitution is the source of all truth.

I have a hobby of picking these tracts up when I find them around the city.

“Dear Soul,” says one, ominously titled “Where Are You Going To Spend Eternity?”

“If you have chosen not to admit your guilt and to trust Jesus Christ as your Saviour, please read what the Bible says ‘…he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.’ (John 3:18)”. The bizarre underlying assumption here is that even if you don’t believe in Jesus, you do believe in the authority of the Bible.

For devout non-Christians, agnostics and atheists, I’d venture a guess that biblically-based threats have a bit of a credibility problem.

But pointing out the intellectual fallacies of the faithful isn’t that productive (or original). Since my own upbringing in an insular Christian denomination, I stopped accepting sermons at face value a long time ago. The child of Sunday School lessons featuring Jesus as a young shepherd with soft brown hair, I used to sit in the pews and wonder how we knew what Jesus looked like. How do we know he was white?

For years, I secretly wondered what it was like for non-white Christians to have Jesus glorified as a member of another race. But I recently realized that I know exactly what it feels like to have your own image conspicuously separated from your image of God.

My parents’ church refuses to ordain women. The webpage for its theological school is couched in carefully gender-neutral terms, but any woman who attempted to apply to the program would quickly discover the males-only policy.

A procession of priests from the 1919 dedication of the cathedral in my parents' hometown. It would look the same today - no women.

A procession of priests from the 1919 dedication of the cathedral in my parents’ hometown. It would look the same today – no women.

Many strident opponents of female clergy in my family’s church declare that over all other doctrinal or cultural factors, priests should be men because maleness is essential to our understanding of God. Some ministers of my home church insist that the Bible does not have a single mention of God as a mother or a woman, and references to God’s power are couched in exclusively male terms. Therefore, a woman could never represent Him to the congregation.

Several years ago, I began to wonder why it was so important to systematically separate the image of my own body from the image of God. I began to wish I had a spiritual role model whom I could better relate to.

It may be the echoing drumbeat of my male-centric childhood faith that sometimes makes me fear that my seeking a female spiritual inspiration is like saying, “tell me when God looks like me, and I’ll tune in,” as if what I really want to worship is an image of myself.

I have no desire to deny God. And I don’t see proof that God exists. But I’m sure of the value of a moral foundation for my life.

I always thought that my home faith (dubbed “the New Church” or Swedenborgianism for Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century philosopher whose theological writings inform its Bible-based doctrine) took a lenient view of my agnostic state. Swedenborg didn’t spout the lake-of-fire stuff. Rather, he wrote that anyone who lives a charitable life according to the faith he or she knows can go to heaven, regardless of denomination.

But apparently I’m on the wrong track.

My long-time friend and high-school classmate, Coleman, grew more certain of his faith as I got more confused. I published a book criticizing the dogma of the Swedenborgian clergy. Coleman enrolled in their theological school and become a pastor.

We have a lot of disagreements, but it doesn’t matter. We get together whenever he’s in town.

He’s a young, social media-savvy pastor. “I want this blog post to be a challenge,” he began an online offering about the importance of acknowledging God as Jesus Christ. He posits that Swedenborgians’ habitual tolerance should extend to people who have had no contact with Christianity, but for those who have had access to the Bible, and therefore the chance to know Christ, it’s a different story.

He presents a series of biblical and Swedenborgian passages that demonstrate the importance of envisioning and acknowledging Jesus Christ to gain entry to heaven.

When I needled him in the comments, he responded at length.

“I don’t think a person can ever really be transformed unless they allow the Lord in,” he said. “Although other religions do present some concept of God, I believe the picture of God as the Lord Jesus Christ is the fullest one. So, if a person rejects Jesus as God, he’s rejecting something in God.”

Coleman dealt kindly with me: “agnostic people can repent too.” He calls my attitude a “good starting point” since it’s not an outright rejection of Jesus Christ. I still have the choice to pray to God to “help my unbelief.” Coleman advised me to love the idea of Jesus, and to “want Him to be real.”

But I sense the same flaw that rankles me in the pamphlets I collect. Just as those Christian propagandists assume that excerpted passages of the Bible will be meaningful to non-Christians, my pastor pal assumes my doubts will be excavated by prayer to reveal a native, underlying certainty in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The guilty truth is that in the broader context of my life, my agnosticism isn’t a starting point. Rather, the solid faith in God’s form that Coleman enjoys now was actually my own starting point. But through a lot of study and thought and living, my perspective changed.

Coleman believes that even if people like me have moral principles, our spiritual insides are fatally unmoored as long as we don’t consciously pin our faith on Jesus Christ.

Coleman says that unless we view repentance this way, “we can and WILL justify living selfishly.” People like me might “MOSTLY not embrace evil”, but since we don’t have the right bedrock (i.e., the Lord Jesus Christ) for our convictions, we’ll always end up with “wiggle room” to excuse sin.

Ostensibly, Swedenborgians object to what they call “the doctrine of faith alone,” which is ably demonstrated by these words of the “Eternity” pamphlet: “Realize that you cannot do anything to earn or help earn your way into heaven. Jesus already completely paid for it when He died on the cross.”

And you thought going to the amusement park was expensive.

Swedenborgians claim to believe that, for salvation, good works are just as important as faith. But it seems the take-home point of my friend’s blog is that ultimately, it matters little that I’ve lived a good life if I haven’t based everything on the correct image of the biblical God Coleman emphasizes as a “Man”.

Which, frankly, reminds me of this passage of the “Eternity” pamphlet: “The question is not if you are a member of a church, but are you saved? It is not if you are leading a good life, but are you saved?” In my own case, my salvation lies in accepting the proper image of God.

Even the most literalistic of Bible-based faiths give a certain leeway when it comes to images of God. The back of the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower magazine provides three images and asks, “How Do You View Jesus?” The choices are “newborn baby,” “dying man,” or “exalted King.”

 

The same publication carries another perspective on accepting Jesus that stopped me in my tracks. Some of Jesus’s contemporaries were “humble enough” to accept that he was God: “included among these were several of Jesus’ family members, who at first had not taken seriously the possibility that one of their relatives could be the Messiah.”

It’s hard enough to accept that a man (Man?) born 2,000 years ago was God or God’s son. But imagine the difficulties of believing that your own brother, cousin or uncle – he of the sly childhood pinches, promising singer/songwriter career or vaguely inappropriate wedding toasts – was the Messiah.

So God can come in at least a few different forms. My home church emphasized Jesus as a grown-up shepherd or a shining bearded man in a white-and-gold robe, but come to think of it, sometimes God was a lamb. I also remember a burning bush, a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. At Christmas, of course, we all took a time-out to worship Jesus as an infant. Our annual pageant always needed a local newborn.

(Last year my cousin married a Ghanaian woman and their baby appeared in the manger – you may not be surprised to hear that a tiny black girl was an unusual choice for the role of Jesus at my church.)

Hark, the herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn king!

Hark, the herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn king!

But acceptable images of God in the Christian tradition are a drop in the bucket compared to the altars of a Buddhist temple.

Earlier this year, I made a friend who’s been a Buddhist nun for almost thirty years. We discussed life and death and faith over bowls of Pho, and then she took me to visit her temple. There, surrounded by a kaleidoscope of stunning images – people, animals and trees, demigods, bodhisattvas and the Buddha – I got a lesson from Geshe Sonam, a Buddhist teacher who studied in Tibet for 20 years.

He seemed so nice that I didn’t feel it would be appropriate to bring up the lake of fire.

I lingered in front of one image in particular. Tara, a bright greenish-blue female Bodhisattva, was perched in the lotus position on a cushion with one foot touching the ground. My friend explained that this goddess was portrayed this way because just soon as you call for her, she’s there, like a mother who hears her child cry in the night.

Comparing Tara to Mary in the Christian tradition, my friend explained that whether or not Tara is visible to you, she protects against evil and danger, and is always there whenever you need her. Tara has many images and colors – up to twenty-one, depending on what branch of Buddhism you’re in – all representing different aspects of her presence.

If God does exist and does love the human race, somehow that goddess’s poised foot tells me everything I need to know.

I’m prepared to admit that the religious scholars may be right. Perhaps, if I can’t force myself to accept the Lord Jesus Christ (shepherd/king/baby/lamb/burning bush/crucified Man), there really is a lake burning merrily in hell for me, Geshe Sonam, and everyone else who didn’t repent in time. Even without violent images of damnation, I am prepared to admit that the world may in fact have an objective spiritual foundation of right and wrong.

But I still ask why people insist on pressing certain images of God upon others. (I think that in the case of my home church, lessons on God’s image reflect patriarchal tradition.) There are probably as many reasons to promote a certain image of God as there are congregations in the world. But I’d never presume to declare who God is inside of you. What qualifies one human being to define God for another human being? Gender? A theological degree? Ordination? Meditation? Revelation?

“Man’s confused religions stand in opposition to God’s simple way of life,” the lake of fire pamphlet insists, explaining that man’s views are “wide” and “tolerant”, while God’s view is narrow. Does the idea that God takes a constricted view while we take a larger view seem backward to anyone else? Insisting on one image of God for everyone probably has more do with the smallness of the human mind than with absolute truth. At the risk of lingering forever outside heaven’s gates, I will say that such a homogeneous world would bore me to death.

If concepts of God are so innate and widely varied, and yet are as crucial to our souls as every denomination keeps insisting, it seems to me that promoting the same image of God for everyone – whether with threats of eternal torture or with gentle scriptural analysis – is like expecting that everyone should be able to adopt the same internal identity. In that case, you aren’t really saying “it is not true that all religious beliefs are of equal value.” It seems to me you’re saying, “it is not true that all people are of equal value.”

And nothing about that reminds me of God.

Happy holidays, readers worldwide – whatever you’re celebrating!

Here I am, Christmas morning 2011. My mom knows how to pick a bathrobe ensemble.

Here I am, Christmas morning 2011. My mom knows how to pick a bathrobe ensemble.

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Posted in Holidays, Religion | 17 Comments »

THE ULTIMATE CHICK-FIL-A BLOG POST

August 4, 2012

Sarah Palin, a former US governor and current media lightning-rod, joins her husband in showing support for traditional Christian values…by buying a fried chicken sandwich. (No word yet on why she wears her sunglasses inside.)

Fair warning to my readers outside the US: Americans have got their panties in a major twist this month about some chicken sandwiches.

My dad introduced me properly to Chick-fil-A when I visited my parents a few months ago.

He had been rhapsodizing about Chick-fil-A for at least two or three days by the time we stepped up to the counter: the hot, tasty chicken sandwich with fresh lettuce and tomato, the waffle fries, and most of all, the milkshakes.

I doubt he remembers his kids’ high school graduation as well as he remembers his first taste of the Chick-fil-A Banana Pudding Milkshake: according to him, the treat was both arctic cold and yet still easy to sip through a straw. Real bananas swam in vanilla ice cream and met ultimate bliss with ‘Nilla Wafer cookie crumbles that retained their delicious crunch.

But that wasn’t all – Dad also extolled the stellar customer service at Chick-fil-A. Not only would they serve you the best chicken sandwich in the biz, they’d make you feel like a king.

When we went to Chick-fil-A, the girl behind the counter beamed as if she’d been waiting for us all day, and the chicken sandwich and milkshake were everything I heard they’d be.

The next week, I dragged myself to the mall (I needed an outfit for a job interview). Hungry and trembling with the exhausted vexation of a full-figured woman searching for a blazer that fits in the arms and waist as well as the bust, I saw the red Chick-fil-A marquee at the food court.

As I sat down at a table with my sandwich, I realized that it needed a spot of mayo. There was a long line at the counter and I could only see ketchup packs. Just as I decided to do without, an elderly man in a Chick-fil-A apron appeared at my left elbow.

“How are you doing today, miss?” he said. “Are you enjoying your lunch? Do you have everything you need today?”

“Hi,” I said. “Actually, I was hoping for some mayonnaise.”

He smiled with pleasure, reached into his apron pocket, and handed me a pack of mayo.

“You have a great day, now,” he said, before moving onto the Chick-fil-A lunchers at the next table.

I was transfixed for several moments by the shock of being waited upon in the mall food court, where the closest thing to customer service is the cleaning staff sweeping the floor right where your feet are resting.

“He drives Chick-fil-A’s efforts to provide genuine hospitality, ensuring that customers have an exceptional dining experience in a Chick-fil-A restaurant,” the Baptist Press said of Dan Cathy in a July 16th article.

Chick-fil-A’s proud Christian foundation has been a source of moderate controversy for a long time – devotees of their chicken sandwiches have long bemoaned the company’s strict policy of closing on Sundays.

Oh, and there’s the small matter of Cathy’s public preference for the “Biblical definition of the family unit”, reconfirmed in the same Baptist Press piece.

We could dwell on which Biblical family Cathy admires: King Solomon’s extraordinary assemblage of concubines, or perhaps Jacob’s marriage to the sisters Leah and Rachel and his subsequent fecund, wife-approved romps with two handmaidens. Or maybe Cathy would emulate King David, who sent Bathsheba’s husband off to die on the front lines after spying on her during her bath. Or maybe the law about a widow marrying her husband’s brother resonates best.

But what Cathy means, of course, is the Biblical importance of denying equal rights to homosexuals. His recent comments on the Ken Coleman Show claim that advocates of gay marriage are “prideful” and “arrogant”.

“We’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,” he says.

Cathy’s comments about gays aren’t usually so pointed or inflammatory. In the past, he’s claimed that Chick-fil-A doesn’t discriminate against anyone, and that as a fast-food restaurant, they have no public political stance.

But gay-rights advocates in the US are pretty riled because of several million dollars Chick-fil-A has donated to far-right American groups that, depending on your source, advocate the “curing” of homosexuality with special reeducation programs, urge the reinstatement of laws against sodomy, teach that homosexuality is naturally associated with pedophilia, and lobby against the repeal of Ugandan laws that punish homosexuality with death.

There hasn’t been a mass shooting, major US natural disaster, or politician caught in a humiliating affair for about two or three weeks over here. Granted, the Olympics are going on. But that doesn’t provide nearly the angst outlet that we need.

So….Chick-fil-A hates gays! TO THE INTERNET!

The fallout has had more unexpected plotlines than a “Game of Thrones” novel.

Among loud lamentations at how tragic it will be to cut this delicious chicken out of our lives, there’s the Chick-fil-A boycott by my liberal peers, who declare that not another penny of their money will go towards donations to hate groups. There was the “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” counter-wave, in which thousands of good southern Christians lined up around the block for chicken sandwiches to show their support for NOT supporting the gays.

Chick-fil-A noted record-breaking sales.

Meanwhile, the wider fray was already breaking into more factions than the rebels of Syria.

Multiple city politicians announced to the press that Chick-fil-A would be blocked from building restaurants in their jurisdictions because of Cathy’s views. A tsunami of self-appointed pundits-turned-Constitutional-scholars fought back to define the proper roles not of women and men, but of business and the government.

While we all got our Constitutional dander up, guerilla skirmishes on first-amendment free speech flared as Facebook apparently disabled a page supporting Chick-fil-A, and then quickly reinstated it. Free-speech stalwarts pointed out that Cathy is entitled to his point of view, while a flood of suspiciously anecdotal news stories countered that the free-speech dispute is irrelevant because discrimination is in action at Chick-fil-A, from gay employees who feel compelled to stay in the closet at work to a woman who claims she was fired because her Chick-fil-A manager said women should be stay-at-home moms.

Business experts were more interested in coolly debating whether corporate presidents helped or hurt their profits by taking public stances on hot political and religious issues.

Anti-gay Christians rejoiced that so many people are still willing to rally to their agenda, as evidenced by the epic queues at Chick-fil-A locations below the Mason-Dixon Line. Gay-rights advocates rejoiced that the last corporate stronghold of anti-gay sentiment in America was nothing but a chicken-sandwich chain.

Meanwhile, the high-minded hipster gentry got to work pointing out everyone’s terminal hypocrisy, declaring that those waiting in line to support Chick-fil-A would never flood the volunteer lists of a homeless shelter with such zeal, as Jesus would no doubt want them to, while also taking their secular community-garden buds to task for boycotting Chick-fil-A without also boycotting companies like Apple, Amazon or McDonalds for their egregious violation of things like fair working standards. An NPR commentator pointed out that mayors publicly decrying Chick-fil-A for anti-gay bigotry have ignored proven and persistent racial discrimination in their own districts.

Other commentators held forth on bullying, while others devised all sorts of ways to bedevil Chick-fil-A: ordering chicken while dressed in drag or, based on an obscure Bible passage about providing food and water to your guests, demanding free food of Chick-fil-A employees, if they’re so Christian and all. Gay-rights enthusiasts responded to Chick-fil-A appreciation Day by staging a nationwide same-sex kiss-in at Chick-fil-A restaurants.

And in perhaps my favorite development of all, fat-acceptance activists have begun blasting liberals who try to shame habitual Chick-fil-A eaters for being fat: fighting homophobia with fat-ism is just trading one form of bigotry for another!

All we need is a questionable study linking Chick-fil-A to autism in children of gay parents, and we could keep the controversy going until next Wednesday, at least.

One thing I wonder about is our possibly overblown notion of ownership. If I have converted my money into a chicken sandwich, and then enjoyed said sandwich, do I have cause to make any demands on what Chick-fil-A does with what was formerly my money?

While there is something to be said for voting with your dollar, and buying products from socially and environmentally responsible companies, I can’t imagine tracking every dollar I spend, to make sure that the business who’s got it is disposing of it in a way that pleases me. That dollar ain’t mine anymore and its fate isn’t my business – I traded it for a goldfish or a bottle of nail polish or a banana.

If Dan Cathy gives a fraction of his profits to anti-gay groups, am I complicit in that, when really all I did was convert my dollar into waffle fries? As soon as I polish off the fries, I have no claim on that dollar anymore. Why should the occasional cheerfully-served, heavenly Chick-fil-A milkshake dog my conscience?

As I type, I can practically hear the screams of the progressive mob, who would behead my spineless rhetoric faster than Henry VIII would dispatch an unwanted wife.

The truth is, I can think of better ways to support gay rights than NOT eating at Chick-fil-A. But I doubt that I’ll eat Chick-fil-A again, at least in Philadelphia. Despite what my parents think about my working in the “big city”, it’s really a pretty small town around here, especially if you’ve got the network of a journalist. I can hardly step off the train without running into someone in the crowd that I know.

God forbid they see me with a Chick-fil-A bag. They might think I’m a bigot. Or a Christian. Or a bully. Or a Constitutional law enthusiast. Or a gay-marriage opponent. Or a fat person. Or a fat-activist-hater. Or a Republican. Or a free-speech zealot. Or a hungry, weak-willed liberal. Or, worst of all, an ignoramus who doesn’t read blogs at all.

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Posted in Challenges of the Modern World, Food, Religion, The Joys of Marriage | 14 Comments »

Catholic Healthcare Comes To My Hospital: a “win-win-win-win” for Holy Redeemer Health System

July 14, 2012

Residents of southeastern Pennsylvania are dreading an arranged marriage.

Funny thing about that merger between Abington Memorial Hospital (where I have been a patient) and Holy Redeemer Health System.

The only people who are calling it a “merger” are the ones who had nothing to do with the decision. So far, these two hospitals outside of Philadelphia, PA (one a local Catholic health system, one a secular community hospital) are more tight-lipped about their new relationship than any recently divorced Hollywood starlet who takes up with a rock singer.

In an official statement dated June 6th, 2012, Abington Health announced plans to form “a new regional health system” with Holy Redeemer, saying, “Abington and Holy Redeemer are committed to providing information to the community as it becomes available.”

So they say.

“There are so many rumors because the hospitals have not been forthcoming. They’re not talking to the public,” says Rita Poley, an artist and curator living in Elkins Park who created a fast-growing Facebook page, “Stop the Abington Hospital Merger”, to oppose what the hospitals call the “new regional system”. The extent of the silence on the proposed “new organization”, which would bring Catholic health directives to a major secular facility, has shocked Abington staff, who did not find out about their board’s decision to pursue the partnership with Holy Redeemer until the news broke in the press.

The local public – especially the large Jewish community in the area – has a livid reaction to what everyone has termed “the merger”, despite the fact that the word “merger” doesn’t appear in any of the hospital releases I’ve received. Rather, in written statements, the hospitals refer to the move as a partnership, a “plan”, a “vision” and a “continuum of services”.

Why are we all so gol-darned upset?

This is big news here, but I realize that more far-flung readers may not know what I’m talking about. This short article from The New York Times, published last February, is a good introduction to the issue of Catholic-secular hospital mergers in the US.

Catholic hospitals, which serve a significant portion of the American public, operate by special guidelines that put religious principles ahead of medical ones.

The most controversial of these rules involve pregnancy (and pregnancy’s prelude) and the end of life. Directives from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) website govern the use of contraceptives, fertility treatments, abortion, and end-of-life choices.

Catholic hospitals prohibit the use of contraceptives or even counseling about contraceptives, aside from “natural family planning” between husbands and wives.

They prohibit abortion in almost every imaginable case, including the earliest stages of conception in the case of rape, life-threatening pregnancies that take hold outside the womb, and cases where the fetus will not survive on its own or be born with fatal defects.

They prohibit sterilization procedures for people who do not want to have children.

They prohibit many forms of fertility treatments, including those that would use a donor egg or sperm because this is undignified and “contrary to the covenant of marriage and the unity of the spouses.”

The Catholic edict of life’s sacredness, from conception to last breath, also means that Catholic institutions “will not honor” an advance healthcare directive (for example, what measures a person wants or does not want performed to prolong life) that they judge contrary to Catholic teaching.

“Any partnership that will affect the mission or religious and ethical identity of the Catholic health care institutional services must respect church teaching and discipline,” the directives say.

That last one is the problem here.

In considering the partnership, Abington, a nationally-renowned high-tech trauma center, agrees that they will stop providing abortions once the partnership is finalized next spring.

Statements from both hospitals attempt to minimize the abortion issue. They point out that according to Pennsylvania records, in the twelve months leading up to last March, in the five-county area of southeastern PA served by the hospital, Abington performed only 48 abortions out of 17,575.

Come on, admit it. Aren’t we all just making a mountain out of a molehill here? Women will obviously be able to find a clinic once Abington complies with Catholic directives.

That’s misleading, Abington physician Dr. Philip Rosenfeld told me in an interview this week. Dr. Rosenfeld is an ear, nose and throat specialist who has been practicing at Abington for 40 years, not counting his Abington internship and surgical residency.

He is disappointed that hospital statements would downplay the abortion issue in this way. He says that describing the statistically tiny number of abortions performed at Abington misses the point.

But why would an ear, nose, and throat doctor care? Unless a pregnant lady needs her tonsils out or something, what does Dr. Rosenfeld have to do with rules in the obstetrics department?

“It’s not just abortions,” he says. “It’s what should rule the hospital. Should it be ruled by someone’s religious convictions? The only thing that should guide your medical decision is what is best for this patient.”

Dr. Rosenfeld tells me that among Abington doctors and staff, opposition to the Catholic partnership is strident and unanimous.  From OB-GYNs to ophthalmologists, Abington doctors are as aghast at the prohibition of abortions as they would be if the Holy Redeemer directives stipulated that appendectomies were to be discontinued as immoral. That’s because, according to Dr. Rosenfeld, this edict touches more than the OB-GYN department: it affects the core philosophy of healthcare itself.

Abington is a secular hospital with a full range of healthcare services, Dr. Rosenfeld explains. “That’s the way we’ve always been, that’s the way we should be. Our orientation should be the patient, not anybody’s religion.”

Many outlets have already covered the fact that Abington is not your average abortion clinic. The number of abortions it performs may be statistically small, but they’re performed at the hospital for a reason. Many of them are emergency life-saving procedures, where women face death unless the pregnancy is terminated.

“Most of these abortions are not about family planning,” Poley adds. “Many of them are medical emergencies. If you’re going to take women out of the hospital, out of the care of their doctors, and say, ‘go to a clinic’, what kind of medical care is that? It’s outrageous.”

(This worthwhile blog post by a local doctor explains many possible implications for women’s care, should Abington comply with Holy Redeemer’s directive).

To drive the point home, Dr. Rosenfeld illustrates with a case two years ago involving a pregnant Holy Redeemer patient.

“She needed an emergency abortion. It was life-threatening. What do you think they did? They sent her to Abington. They wouldn’t do it there, even though they risked her life to transport her.”

Rita Poley was shocked by the Abington/Holy Redeemer news, and the way it was allowed to blindside the public and hospital staffers alike.

Rita Poley

“My daughter said, you know what you need, Mom? You need a Facebook page.”

With the help of a friend, Poley launched her Stop The Abington Hospital Merger page on July 3rd, and begin circulating a petition to halt the partnership.

About a week later, it had 25,000 views and 800 “likes”. The next day, unique visitors to the page was up to 36,000, and it topped 55,000 by the end of the week.  The petition garnered over 4,000 signatures in one week. As of July 14th, it had well over 5,000. Poley notes that support is coming in across religious lines.

While she was glad to speak up, Poley was unprepared for the deluge of community and local and national media attention that followed her decision to spearhead the opposition. “I’m like this little artist person,” she laughs of trying to balance all the publicity with her busy job as curator and director of the Temple Judea Museum.

The child of parents who owned a Jewish bakery in Philadelphia, Poley insists that she’s “not a regular activist,” but she’s no stranger to motivating for a good cause.

“My first activism was when I was nine years old. I wrote to City Hall to ask them to put a traffic light on a busy corner,” she remembers.

Poley is moved to protect the principle of community healthcare unbiased by religious dogma. But the deafening silence from the decision-makers disturbs her just as much.

The lack of public hearings, and a refusal by board officials to give interviews, worries her and countless other community members who want to know what’s happening.

In current statements, the hospitals say that despite traditional Catholic directives, Abington will continue to provide contraceptive services, tubal ligations and vasectomies, operate its well-known fertility clinic, and honor patients’ end-of-life directives and Do Not Resuscitate orders.

“Patients receiving care at Abington will have access to all reproductive health services except abortion,” reads a July 12th statement. “Abington Health’s philosophy and practices regarding end-of-life care will remain unchanged.”

“What does this mean?” Poley asks. Given the refusal of hospital officials so far to discuss anything further with the public, “what’s going to happen next month, in six months, or a year?” The demonstrated reality of secular/religious hospital mergers and Catholic directives across the US healthcare system, combined with the suspicious silence from the entities involved in this local tempest, make community members extremely nervous about what might be coming, and whether it might happen behind doors firmly shut to staff, the press and the community the hospital serves.

“There was not a word said,” Dr. Rosenfeld explains of the new partnership. “Everyone on the board had to sign a confidentiality agreement until the decision was released. And among the other people who had no idea was the chairman of the [Abington] OB-GYN department. He had no idea that this was coming until it came. He was blindsided by a cannon, basically. Nobody knew.”

To him, this is almost as sinister as the prospect of religious teachings, instead of medical expertise and respect for individual patients, guiding Abington doctors’ care.

“You can’t get through to the administration now with your opinion,” he says. “They’re not interested, they’re not responding. And that’s why [the press] can’t get through either. They don’t want to hear from you; they don’t want to hear from anybody.”

He urges community members to continue an onslaught of letters, phone-calls and e-mails to the Abington board. “Unless enough of the board members’ minds can be changed in the near future, this will go through to the great harm of the hospital and the community,” he says emphatically.

As a journalist, I wanted to balance my perspective. I don’t want press releases whose real purpose is to keep me at arm’s length, rather than inform me.

Someone close to the negotiations at Holy Redeemer spoke with me on the promise of strict confidentiality. This source described the partnership as a beneficial meeting between Abington’s “high-tech” and Holy Redeemer’s “high-touch” philosophies. While Abington is known for cutting-edge trauma treatment, Holy Redeemer is one of the largest and best-regarded hospice and long-term care providers in the region.

So I tried to get an interview.

I e-mailed Barbara L’Amoreaux, a spokesperson for Holy Redeemer. When she didn’t respond to my query, I called the next day.

I asked if she could connect me with anyone there for an official statement. She said she was just about to send me an updated release. I asked if anyone would give an interview, to balance comments from the opposition.

She said they were not giving any interviews, but that she would keep me in mind if that changed.

She also chuckled audibly.

The statement she sent confirmed that in partnering with Holy Redeemer, Abington would not perform abortions come spring of 2013. But the statement also reads that Abington will continue to provide “all necessary measures to preserve the health of the mother, including those that may result in terminating a pregnancy”.

I e-mailed again to ask for clarification on this point, but she didn’t reply.

Instead of denying interviews, Holy Redeemer might do well to revisit the USCCB directives.

“The possibility of scandal must be considered when applying the principles governing cooperation,” USCCB writes of secular/Catholic mergers. “Scandal can sometimes be avoided by an appropriate explanation of what is in fact being done at the health care facility under Catholic auspices.”

Before we ask that Abington and Holy Redeemer shut their partnership negotiations, we should ask that they open their mouths outside the boardroom.

“I can only conjecture on why they’re keeping quiet,” Dr. Rosenfeld says. “But for them, it’s a huge plus.” According to him, Abington is a profitable hospital, while Holy Redeemer is not: “this is Abington becoming their savior. Not only do they get saved economically, but they get their religious dogma as part of the entire institution. For them, it’s a win-win-win-win and why would they comment?”

“They know what they’re doing,” one of my neighbors said bitterly at the local train station this week.

As I interviewed Poley at a coffee shop a few blocks from each of our homes, the woman sitting at the next table, unnoticed at the time by Poley, slid a piece of paper onto our table before leaving the shop.

“As long as they don’t satisfy this community outrage, this will continue to fester,” Poley promises. “This will become more and more of a community effort.”

What’s your opinion? Do you go to a Catholic hospital? Why or why not? What has your experience been?

Update: on July 18th, among increasing community outcry, a statement was released calling off the partnership between the two hospitals. 

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Posted in Medical Crisis, Religion | 5 Comments »

How to Stop Your Wife from Having Tantrums at Costco, and Other Christian Marriage Tips

July 2, 2012

I recently stumbled across a marriage-themed Christian blog that hijacked my thoughts for days. Sometimes, when I go on the internet, I wish there was a TSA for my mind, patting down ideas and limiting the contents of their personal baggage.

So it was that I encountered Peacefulwife’s Blog, with the tagline “The Joy of God’s Design for Wives and Marriage”. I should have cried “to each her own!”, and found some mischievous cat videos instead. But Peacefulwife touched a place in my mind that chitters like the lid of a stainless steel pot when the rice boils over.

What caught my eye was a guest post by Christian marriage writer Daniel Robertson, titled “5 Ways Wives Unwittingly Disrespect Their Husbands”.

My five-year wedding anniversary is coming up this week, and I’m all for learning about ways to improve my marriage. Robertson begins with a true-life anecdote:

“One day my wife and I went shopping at Costco. I began to lead her in one direction fully expecting her to come along with me, but instead she seemed upset and asked me where I was going. Being the boneheaded man that I am, I didn’t tell her, but instead just motioned for her to follow me.”

The Costco trip, far from being a utopia of bathtub-sized ketchup crocks and toothbrush ten-packs, did not turn out well. The wife “stormed off in the other direction” and they did their shopping separately.

“I was floored,” Robertson writes. “Why couldn’t she just follow my lead, I thought. Did I really need to explain to her that I just wanted to grab some bread?”

I already knew the moral of this story. I have lived it countless times in my own marriage, when I kept my mouth shut about what I wanted and then resented my spouse for not being psychic. Surely God and therapists alike are behind the notion of good communication.

But I was wrong.

“The point of the story is that I felt completely disrespected,” Roberston continues. “All I wanted was for my wife to follow my lead through the store and not question what direction I was taking her.”

Uh-oh.

“Ladies, your husband thrives on respect,” Robertson advises. “It is just as important to him as feeling loved is to you.”

Looking through some of Peacefulwife’s own posts, in which she refers to her own spouse as “Respected Husband”, I can see why she invited Robertson to her blog.

A pharmacist, mother of two, stanch Christian and self-confessed former control freak, Peacefulwife now devotes herself to the pursuit of a Bible-based marriage ideal of female submission, and blogs to exhort other women to do the same.

In marriage, she writes, women need love and men need respect. To her (and, presumably, her church-based counselors), this means relinquishing all important decisions to her husband, as God decrees she should.

“If only Eve had known what I am going to tell you!” she begins in a post titled “Let Me Check with My Husband and Get Back with You”.

Peacefulwife has a ready response for any salesperson, neighbor, fellow worshipper, friend or “cult missionary” who asks her for something.

“I need to talk to my husband about that,” she says. Or, “I’ll ask my husband.”

“Imagine if Eve had used one of these phrases when Satan was giving her the offer of a lifetime in the Garden? Wow!”

It’s an interesting take on Original Sin. Instead of disobeying God, Eve just failed to check with Adam.

I want to be fair to Peacefulwife. A reader recently wrote me to say that I lack humility, and that I have a “huge” chip on my shoulder: I hold my opponents in contempt, and my angry tone subverts my message.

So I should clarify that I, too, fully advocate asking your husband. Situations in which I ask my husband include any time a mechanic claims my car needs work, any time someone invites me to do something I really don’t want to do, and any time someone inquires after my husband’s opinions.

Otherwise, my husband and I view decisions as mutual discussions.

“God gave him wisdom that He did not give to me,” Peacefulwife explains of why the husband must be the ultimate household arbiter, and while she does say that her husband values her perspective on his own choices, she is “THANKFUL for God’s wisdom in setting this authority structure into place in our marriage.”

There is something a little seductive about Peacefulwife’s way of life, which leaves all decisions to the husband. It sounds like retirement, or going on vacation without any pets to worry about. I would probably enjoy it for about two days.

But even though I don’t ask for his permission to join a board of directors or change jobs, I do plan to spend a lifetime respecting my spouse. So I read with interest Daniel Robertson’s advice on properly respecting your husband.

Some of his advice really resonates with me. He urges wives not to answer questions that someone else directs at your husband. I think this rule should apply to everyone, not just spouses: don’t speak for other people when it’s their turn to pipe up. Robertson also chides wives who don’t consult their husbands on major decisions, like where to go on vacation or how to spend a tax return.

But given the whole Costco follow-my-lead fiasco, I suspect Robertson doesn’t offer any primers urging husbands not to interrupt their wives, or to consult their wives on important decisions.

His other tips for ensuring wifely respect are even more worrying.

First, he believes that acting like your husband’s “mommy” (setting out his clothes, wiping food off his face, or reminding him to brush his teeth) is “a common mistake that almost every wife makes.” Who knew marriages were crumbling because wives were helping husbands dress or advocating good hygiene?

“Guess what?” Robertson asks. “Your husband didn’t marry you to get a new mommy, he married you to get a partner.”

But according to Robertson’s next piece of advice, a partner is not what your husband really wants at all.

“You tell your husband you want him to lead, but every time he tries you end up questioning him or going against him,” Robertson warns. “He sets his foot down but you find sneaky ways to get around it. He doesn’t want a certain TV show on in his house but you argue about how it’s not so bad and watch it anyway. Let your husband lead already!”

As if to reinforce his ideal wife’s childlike position in the home, his next piece of advice warns wives against “tak[ing] over with the kids”.

“Your husband is trying to discipline or instruct the kids and you just have to step in and take over,” he writes. “There is no need for this. He is perfectly capable of handling them.”

As he is also perfectly capable of handling you, even down to which TV shows you may watch.

I respect every couple’s right to fashion their own lives within the law (or, in the case of homosexual couples in many US states, outside of it). Some couples have an open marriage, some have dogs for ring-bearers, some go to a house of worship every week, some live apart and some never stir a step unless they’re together.

So what really troubles me in Robertson’s case isn’t that his vision of marriage galls me. Rather, it’s that I find his advice on being a good “partner” highly disingenuous. The relationship he advocates (in which one party “sets his foot down” and the other unquestioningly obeys) may be a version of marriage, but it is not a partnership. It is the relationship of an adult and his unruly child.

Even worse is Robertson’s phrase, “All I wanted was for my wife to follow my lead through the store and not question what direction I was taking her.” It’s as if asking a person to silently negate her own needs and questions on a daily basis is a modest and painless request.

Since Robertson had his say, I’ll feel free to throw my own take out there.

Godly or not, the waters of his own marriage are indisputably troubled if his wife “storms off” in public with no more provocation than a simple wordless gesture. Perhaps pent-up misery at her own lack of agency in the marriage has left her with a hair-trigger sensibility that can’t even handle a joint trip to the store.

Why can’t I just leave religious folks to their own sphere?

Because maybe, among Peacefulwife’s devotees, there is a woman who silently grieves at abdicating responsibility, instead of sharing it before her God.

Another Peacefulwife’s Blog guest post by Being June titled “A letter to my newlywed self” exhorts women to memorize and live by this sequence of priorities: “God, husband, children, work, self.” Maybe there’s a wife out there who secretly questions the lesson that she comes last, while her spouse gets a pedestal second only to God. Would God tell you to go to the office every day without breakfast? If you can’t work on an empty stomach, what can a perpetually hungry, marginalized self bring to a marriage?

It’s telling that this sequence does not even allow a woman to put herself above her employment. Why can’t a woman aim for an integrated self that balances many needs (just as she loves multiple children equally well), instead of dissecting the elements of her life into a rigid hierarchy?

I understand what it’s like to absorb that hierarchy. As a child, I assimilated religion-lesson diagrams that illustrated a man’s wisdom versus a woman’s emotional nature, and why this distinguished men as spiritual and practical leaders. I have listened to sermons and read books that urged women to “keep quiet” and leave important decisions to others.

Speaking of traditional religious scholarship, I would suggest that Peacefulwife’s fans think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I had the privilege of seeing this week in a Philadelphia exhibit.

It’s highly unlikely that any women were clutching the quill when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written. Hardly anyone knew how to read and write at all, except religious scholars, who were male.

I suppose I could twist this into an argument for Peacefulwife to stay silent, like the traditional wives she claims to emulate. You can’t be a true submissive AND yammer your opinions on the internet to guide other people.  Surely biblical wives did not write down marriage advice and post it in public.

But I have my blog and Peacefulwife is entitled to hers. Write on, sister in online discourse.

Meanwhile, I think that women who tout hearkening back to biblical-era tenets of “submissive” wives should remember that few, if any, of those wives were writing or leading public discourse. But nowadays, Peacefulwife and many of her peers enjoy Christian accolades for launching successful blogs.

If God smiles on the work of Peacefulwife, perhaps a lack of female writers isn’t the only thing about women’s lives that can properly change over time.

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Posted in Religion, The Joys of Marriage | 21 Comments »

Lay Off Pastor Worley! You’ve Misunderstood This Man of God.

May 25, 2012

Every time someone in America so much as farts in the direction of a liberal cause, I get a mass e-mail with a petition from a human rights organization faster than you can say “social media”. The outraged letter is already written for me. It even says “Sincerely, Alaina Mabaso” at the bottom. All I have to do is click once to open the e-mail, click on the link to the letter, and click again to add my name to the petition.

Saving the world has never been easier.

So it was that when Pastor Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina preached in a recent sermon (filmed and put on YouTube) that he’d figured out a way to get rid of the queers and gays and lesbians forever, my e-mail inbox and Facebook feed began to hum with rage.

As the Huffington Post puts it in its headline, Pastor Worley wants to “Put Gays and Lesbians In [An] Electrified Pen To Kill Them Off.”

“NC Pastor calls for concentration camps for gays” announced the e-mail I got today from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

“I was simply sickened to hear you advocate for LGBT people to be rounded up and killed off behind electrified fences,” the HRC says in the letter it so kindly wrote for me. “Your despicable remarks did not channel a message of faith, but instead a message of hate…I hope you will learn from this egregious error in judgment.”

Facebook comments were no less disturbed.

“He isn’t fit to pastor any church,” said one. “I say let’s hog tie his ass and kick the S@#T OUT OF HIM,” added another.

My cousin Jim is gay, and he lives in North Carolina (FYI, international readers: NC recently passed an amendment to its state constitution banning gay marriage and denying legal recognition of any civil unions and domestic partnerships, whether the partners are gay or straight – henceforth, the only partnerships recognized by the NC government will be heterosexual marriages). Jim penned an open letter to Pastor Worley, struggling to reconcile Worley’s hate with Christianity’s true call for mercy and not casting stones.

My cousin writes that he was “humbled” after working through his anger at Pastor Worley and realizing that no-one is perfect, including himself. “The judgment of Mr. Worley is not mine,” Jim says. “I am trying my best to love Mr. Worley in spite of his stones. I am going to drop my stones and let the Lord judge Mr. Worley.”

Poor Pastor Worley. If you guys would all just listen carefully to the recording itself, you’d see that we’ve misinterpreted the guy.

Yes, Pastor Worley opposes equal rights for gay people. “The Bahble’s agin’ it,” he says, “God’s agin’ it, Ah’m agin’ it, if you’ve got any sense, you’re agin’ it!”

This is greeted by hoots and amens from his congregation.

But why is everyone saying that Pastor Worley wants to round gays up in a concentration camp and murder them behind an electric fence?

Clearly, that’s not the point of what he’s actually saying.

Yes, it’s true he doesn’t want to share the world with gays. “Ah figured out a way to git rid of all the lesbians n’ queers but Ah couldn’t git it past Congress,” he says mournfully.

But how does he want to get rid of them? With an electric fence? No! He would simply use the gays’ own true nature against them.

Here’s what he says.

“Build a great big large fence, fifty or a hunnerd miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homo-sexuals. And have the fence electrified so they can’t git out. In a few years they’ll die out. D’ya know why? They cain’t reproduce.”

What are we all getting so upset about? Clearly Pastor Worley is not looking at the gays’ isolation behind the fence, or even the electricity of said fence, as a fatal force. After all, he advocates feeding the gays by aerial deliveries. Fifty or a hundred miles is a lot of space – that’s hardly a “pen”, Huffington Post! Presumably the gays could forage, build shelters or even start a farm. They wouldn’t die at Pastor Worley’s hand.

Instead of calling for death camps, what he’s trying to call to our attention is a simple biological reality. Surely what he wants to point out is that there’s absolutely no merit in gays helping parent relatives’ children, adopting children, or even conceiving their own children through advances in reproductive science. Gays cannot reproduce, and their confinement behind the electric fence would simply serve to demonstrate this unavoidable fact to the public.

The gays would live out the rest of the current generation behind the fences, noshing on the food so generously air-dropped by Pastor Worley, and failing to replenish their ranks.

Of course, like any plan that seems flawless at face value, there could be glitches here and there. Yes, through the work of nature, we could rid ourselves of the current generation of American gays – but since it sometimes happens that gay children are born to heterosexual parents, even good, Godly ones, what then? Would these children be removed to join their compatriots behind the fence? That would bring up the problem of prolonging the gay population after all, especially if it turned out the gays were capable, in their way, of parenting these abandoned children.

We also would have to face the fact that some gays might not regard the air-drop of food supplies as sufficient incentive to relocate behind the fence. This might even make them want to conceal their homosexuality.

There’s also the chance, however small, that some of the gays, after being fenced, could escape. But if we can do such a good job of keeping the Mexicans out, surely a 100-mile electrified fence for the gays could be effectively guarded (current government funds for enforcement of anti-discrimination laws could be redirected to pay the guards).

These are all small problems that can surely be overcome for a greater cause.

So it isn’t clear to me why the media has denounced Pastor Worley as a bigot and a would-be mass murderer. We haven’t listened properly to the man. He doesn’t want to kill the gays any more than we want to kill endangered mollusks when we dam rivers for our own necessary uses. The gays would simply die out as a natural side-effect of a bigger agenda: to protect us all from the gays’ nefarious plan to love somebody.

The electric-fence proposal isn’t the only part of the sermon the media has insisted on denigrating, but again, they’ve completely missed the point.

“God have mercy, it makes me pukin’ sick to think about,” Pastor Worley says, wondering out loud if he can even say it at the pulpit. “If you imagine kissin’ some man…” his voice trails off in disgust.

While the media has assumed that Pastor Worley means to paint gays as people who collectively make the nation puke, I think this is secondary to his true meaning. The crux of his argument here is that we can sometimes get caught up in debating the social and civil aspects of gays’ quality of life – the right to visit partners in the hospital, take custody of partners’ children, obtain domestic partners’ health insurance, or work without fear of being fired for their gayness – when the important thing is to fixate on gay sex acts, just as it’s our God-given responsibility to dwell on the nighttime activities of every heterosexual couple we pass in the street.

And on a related note, I’m not ashamed to say that, as a married heterosexual woman, I completely agree with Pastor Worley on this. I wouldn’t want to kiss “some man” either – I want to kiss my spouse! Imagine kissing just anyone when you love someone else – yuck. Surely Pastor Worley, too, would like to point out the damage of kissing strangers all willy-nilly.

So that’s why I think we all owe Pastor Worley an apology. As so often happens in the hurricane of fury that passes for American news, we’ve misjudged the true facts of the situation. Even the Human Rights Campaign has gotten it dead wrong, calling for Pastor Worley to regret his “error in judgment.”

I find that Pastor Worley’s sermon is more of an exercise in gut feeling, rather than reason. Just another way the media misrepresents him.

So I hope you can all join me in spreading Pastor Worley’s word. I could’ve just signed that letter from my in-box, but there was so much more I wanted to say.

In case anyone is in any doubt, and it seems from the comments that they are, the reason I signed up with the Human Rights Campaign in the first place is that I strongly oppose statements like those from Pastor Worley. It’s a pretty sad reflection of the world that religiously-justified bigotry like Worley’s is so prevalent that some people didn’t know I was joking. However this piece strikes you, you’re welcome to leave a comment. 

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Posted in Challenges of the Modern World, Religion | 19 Comments »

Bodhisattvas, the Burning Bush or My Ghanaian Cousin: What’s Your Image of God?

March 8, 2012

“I’ve Got My Own Religion” read a small pamphlet left on the bus I boarded. According to my best guess, it has a rabbi (or a Greek Orthodox priest?), a woman in a burqa, a Buddhist monk, and a woman with some kind of cross wrapped in twine (is she Wiccan or something? Forgive my ignorance). Anyway, they all have the friendliest expressions (except the Muslim lady, it’s hard to tell what her face looks like). Somehow, their innocent smiles – especially in the case of the beatific expression of the elderly Buddhist – make the part about the lake of fire, featured inside the pamphlet, all that much more painful.

“It is not true that all religious beliefs are of equal value,” the tract explains. “Jesus Christ claims to be the truth. He did not say ‘I am a way,’ but rather, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me’ (John 14:6).”

To me, tracts like this have a glaring rhetorical flaw. Expecting them to convert devout non-Christians seems a bit like believing that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would clamor for American citizenship if we could just get him a booklet declaring that the US Constitution is the source of all truth.

“Dear Soul,” says a pamphlet ominously titled “Where Are You Going To Spend Eternity?”

“If you have chosen not to admit your guilt and to trust Jesus Christ as your Saviour, please read what the Bible says ‘…he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.’ (John 3:18)”. The bizarre underlying assumption here is that even if you don’t believe in Jesus, you do believe in the authority of the Bible.

I think it’s safe to say that devout non-Christians and atheists are comfortable with their beliefs (or lack thereof) at least in part because, for them, the Bible has a bit of a credibility problem.  People who don’t believe in Jesus Christ probably don’t put great stock in the Bible, so it stands to reason that biblically-based threats may not be effective.

I know, pointing out the intellectual fallacies of the faithful, or faith itself, isn’t that productive (or original). I admit, since my own upbringing in an insular Christian denomination (briefly explained here), I have long failed to focus exclusively on the sermon. Instead, the child of Sunday school lessons featuring Jesus as a young shepherd with soft brown hair, I used to sit in the pews and wonder how we knew what Jesus looked like. For example, how did we know that Jesus was white?

For years, I secretly wondered what it was like for non-white Christians to have Jesus resolutely represented as a member of another race. But I recently realized that I know exactly what it feels like to have your own image conspicuously separated from your image of God.

My parents’ church refuses to ordain women. Perhaps because of an awareness of how this appears to the modern world, the webpage for its theological school is couched in carefully gender-neutral terms, but any woman who attempted to apply to the program would quickly discover the males-only policy.

A clergy procession at the dedication of the cathedral in my parents' hometown in 1919. It'd look the same today: no women.

Many strident opponents of female clergy declare that over all other doctrinal or cultural factors, priests should be men because maleness is essential to our understanding of God. As some ministers of my home church insist, the Bible does not have a single mention of God as a mother or a woman, and references to God’s power are couched in exclusively male terms. Therefore, a woman could never represent Him on the chancel.

The cathedral's chancel today. Except for the annual Christmas pageant (someone has to be Mary), it's a no-woman zone during services.

After about twenty-five years of parroting what I’d learned about God, I began to consider the effects of systematically separating the image of my own body from my image of God. I began to wish I had a spiritual role model whom I could better relate to. I began to think that there’s no good reason women should be barred from spiritual leadership.

It may be the echoing drumbeat of my male-centric childhood faith that sometimes makes me fear that my seeking a female spiritual inspiration is like saying, “tell me when God looks like me, and I’ll tune in,” as if what I really want to worship is an image of myself. Am I setting my own self up as some kind of false idol in opposition to the Ten Commandments?

I have to admit, I have a soft spot for the Commandments – or the lesson in any religion that promotes love to the neighbor by avoiding things like lying, coveting, infidelity and murder. I’ve clung to my faith in the value of moral behavior as I’ve grappled with my image of God.

As a pragmatic person, I like consistent principles even if the deeper reasons for some things are unknown. For example, my body is affected by a chronic illness. Nobody knows what caused the illness, but I take daily steps to combat the symptoms and continue working. Speaking of work, nobody knows what’s going to happen to journalists in the digital world. But I take things a week at a time and do the work that exists.

I don’t know what I believe about God – I have no desire to deny God, but I also don’t see proof that God exists. Just as I manage my illness without knowing its cause, and pursue my career without knowing its future, I decided that I’m not going to wait until I’m sure of God and God’s image to live life as charitably as I can. Some people have a glowing surety of God’s role in their lives. I take crude comfort in knowing that if the faithful are right and my soul is un-evolved, at least I’m being kind to others.

I always thought that my home faith, sometimes known as the New Church or Swedenborgianism for the 18th-century philosopher whose writings inform its Bible-based doctrine, took a lenient view of my agnostic state: Swedenborgians usually don’t spout the lake-of-fire stuff. Rather, they believe that anyone who lives a charitable life according to the precepts he or she knows can go to heaven, regardless of denomination.

But wait. Not so fast. Apparently I’m on the wrong track here.

My long-time friend and high-school classmate, Coleman, grew more certain of his faith as fast as I got confused. I published a book criticizing the teaching methods of Swedenborgian clergy. Coleman enrolled in their theological school. Now he’s a pastor, while I seldom go to church but continue to agitate the community with pro-woman articles.

We rarely agree on anything, but it doesn’t really matter. We met for breakfast yesterday.

He’s a young, social media-savvy pastor. “I want this blog post to be a challenge,” he began a recent online offering about the importance of acknowledging God as Jesus Christ, despite Swedenborgians’ penchant for tolerance. He posits that this tolerance should extend to people who have had no contact with Christianity, but for those who have had access to the Bible and therefore had the chance to know Christ, it’s a different story.

He presented a series of biblical and Swedenborgian passages that demonstrate the importance of envisioning and acknowledging Jesus Christ to make it into heaven.

When I needled him in the comments, he responded at length.

“I don’t think a person can ever really be transformed unless they allow the Lord in,” he says. “Although other religions do present some concept of God, I believe the picture of God as the Lord Jesus Christ is the fullest one. So, if a person rejects Jesus as God, he’s rejecting something in God.”

Coleman deals kindly with me. “Agnostic people can repent too,” he says. He calls my agnosticism “a good starting point” since it’s not an outright rejection of Jesus Christ, and I can still journey to acceptance by praying to God to “help my unbelief”. He advises me to love the idea of Jesus and the idea of Jesus’s reality, and to “want Him to be real.” But I sense the same flaw that rankled me in the bus pamphlets. Just as those Christian propagandists assume that excerpted passages of the Bible will be meaningful to non-Christians, my friend seems to expect that my doubts can be excavated by prayer to reveal a native, underlying certainty in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I’m still troubled. The guilty truth, now made public online, is that in the broader context of my life, my agnosticism isn’t a starting point. Rather, the solid faith in God’s form that Coleman enjoys now was actually my own starting point. But through a lot of study and thought and living, my perspective began to change.

Coleman seems to be saying that even if people like me are acting in a moral way, our spiritual insides are still fatally unmoored as long as we don’t consciously pin our faith on Jesus Christ.

No-one but Jesus Christ allows us to fully uproot the sin in our lives: “I think that only happens when we shun evil as a sin against the Lord.” Unless we view repentance this way, “we can and WILL justify living selfishly.” People like me might “MOSTLY not embrace evil”, but since they don’t have a bedrock (i.e., the Lord Jesus Christ) for their moral convictions, they’ll always end up with “wiggle room” to excuse sin, thinking, for example, that “it’s OK to hate THIS person” if somebody wrongs them.

Perhaps if I could do a better job of accepting the Lord Jesus Christ, it would temper my hatred for Rush Limbaugh.

Slut: Noun. 1) an immoral or dissolute woman; prostitute 2) A woman who speaks publicly on political opinions that are opposed to Rush's.

In the gentlest terms possible, Coleman is advising me on my shot of getting into heaven. Ostensibly, Swedenborgians object to what they call “the doctrine of faith alone”, which is ably demonstrated by these words of the “Eternity” pamphlet: “Realize that you cannot do anything to earn or help earn your way into heaven. Jesus already completely paid for it when He died on the cross.” (And you thought going to the amusement park was expensive.)

Swedenborgians claim to believe that, for salvation, good works are just as important as faith. But it seems the take-home point of my friend’s blog is that ultimately, it matters little that I’ve lived a good life if I haven’t based everything on the correct image of the biblical God Coleman emphasizes as a “Man”.

Which, frankly, reminds me of this passage of the “Eternity” pamphlet: “The question is not if you are a member of a church, but are you saved? It is not if you are leading a good life, but are you saved?” In my own case, my salvation lies in accepting the proper image of God.

Even the most literalistic of Bible-based faiths give a certain leeway when it comes to images of God. The back of the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower magazine provides three images and asks, “How Do You View Jesus?” The choices are “newborn baby”, “dying man”, or “exalted King”.

Courtesy of Jehovah's Witnesses.

The same publication carries another perspective on accepting Jesus that stopped me in my tracks. Some of Jesus’s contemporaries were “humble enough” to accept that he was God: “included among these were several of Jesus’ family members, who at first had not taken seriously the possibility that one of their relatives could be the Messiah.”

It’s hard enough to accept that a man (Man?) born 2,000 years ago was God or God’s son. But imagine the difficulties of believing that your own brother, cousin or uncle – he of the sly childhood pinches, promising singer/songwriter career or vaguely inappropriate wedding toasts – was the Messiah.

So God can come in at least a few different forms. My home church emphasized Jesus as a grown-up shepherd or a shining bearded man in a white-and-gold robe, but come to think of it, sometimes God was a lamb. I also remember something about a burning bush, a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. At Christmas, of course, we all took a time-out to worship Jesus as an infant. Someone’s newborn baby was always cast to lie in a manger on the cathedral chancel during our annual Christmas pageant.

(Last year my cousin married a Ghanaian woman and their baby was cast as Jesus. It was definitely the first time Jesus was ever portrayed by a black girl at my church.)

Hark, the herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn king!

But acceptable images of God in the Christian tradition are a drop in the bucket compared to the altars of a Buddhist temple.

I recently made a new friend who’s been a Buddhist nun for almost thirty years. We discussed life and death and faith over bowls of Pho, and then she took me to visit her temple. There, surrounded by a kaleidoscope of stunning images – people, animals and trees, demigods, bodhisattvas and the Buddha – I got a lesson from Geshe Sonam, a Buddhist teacher who studied in Tibet for 20 years.

(He seemed so nice that I didn’t feel it would be appropriate to bring up the lake of fire.)

I lingered in front of one image in particular. Tara, a bright-blue female Bodhisattva, perched in the lotus position on a cushion, but with one foot touching the ground. My friend explained that this goddess was portrayed this way because just soon as you call for her, she’s there, like a mother who hears her child cry in the night.

Comparing Tara to Mary in the Christian tradition, my friend explained that whether or not Tara is visible to you, she protects against evil and danger, and is always there whenever you need her. Tara has many images and colors – up to twenty-one, depending on what branch of Buddhism you’re in – all representing different aspects of her nature.

If God does exist and does love the human race, somehow that goddess’s poised foot tells me everything I need to know.

I realize that, contrary to my pastor friend’s blog post or the Christian magazines and pamphlets I’ve collected, my essay is long on personal conjecture and short on doctrinal references. Coleman definitely has the advantage here – though, since because of my sex I’m officially barred from earning the degree that he did, my lesser knowledge may not be entirely my own fault.

I’m prepared to admit that the religious scholars may be right. Perhaps, if I can’t force myself to accept the Lord Jesus Christ (shepherd/king/baby/lamb/flaming bush/crucified Man), there really is a lake burning merrily in hell for me, Geshe Sonam, and everyone else who didn’t repent in time. Even without violent images of damnation, I am prepared to admit that the world may in fact have an objective spiritual foundation of right and wrong.

But I still ask why people insist on pressing certain images of God upon others. I think that in the case of my home church, lessons on God’s image have become bound up, whether consciously or not, with the maintenance of patriarchal leadership. There are probably as many reasons to promote a certain image of God as there are congregations in the world. Somehow, after twenty-odd years of lessons on the “true” image of God, I’m completely content to say to anyone who asks that it’s not for me to declare who God is inside of you, simply because no human being is ever fully qualified to define God for another human being.

Some recent graduates of the Swedenborgian theological school. Kind, auspicious gentlemen. But has three years of doctrinal study qualified them to define God for all of us?

“Man’s confused religions stand in opposition to God’s simple way of life,” the lake of fire pamphlet insists, explaining that man’s views are “wide” and “tolerant”, while God’s view is narrow. Does the idea that God takes a constricted view while humans take a larger view seem backward to anyone else? Insisting on one image of God for everyone probably has more do with the smallness of the human mind than with absolute truth. At the risk of lingering forever outside heaven’s gates, I will say that such a homogeneous world would bore me to death.

If concepts of God are so innate and widely varied, and yet are as crucial to our souls as every denomination keeps insisting, it seems to me that promoting the same image of God for everyone – whether with threats of eternal torture or with gentle scriptural analysis – is like expecting that everyone should be able to adopt the same internal landscape. In that case, you aren’t really saying “it is not true that all religious beliefs are of equal value.” It seems to me you’re saying, “it is not true that all people are of equal value.”

And nothing about that idea reminds me of God.

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