3/17/15

During Lent, I've been going to a small discussion group led by Barbara. We usually go through the up-coming readings for Sunday and discuss what they mean. Most of the time, the discussions travel in all sorts of interesting directions, and I find the stories everyone tells as absorbing as the verses themselves.

One of the stories I heard today was about someone's experience at a fitness centre for women. One of the other people who goes there to work out is transgender; and the person was telling us about how she was having trouble seeing this person as a woman because she was in the process of transitioning but still very masculine looking. She didn't have an issue with it; she just found it difficult to do. She said she was praying about how to do that while working out, and that day, the transgendered lady thanked everyone for making her feel so accepted and comfortable there. She'd had trouble being accepted almost everywhere else, and she was really thankful to find a place where she felt welcomed. That really helped her see the woman that was inside and the cross she had to bear being transgendered.

It was a nice story. And what was better was that pretty much everyone in the room spoke approvingly/in support of the transgendered woman and the LGBT community in general. I also liked the way that Barbara talked about the readings, especially what she said about the progression of Judeo-Christian spirituality. In essence, people have a tendency to grasp at the letter rather than the spirit of the law, and we're constantly struggling with this.

The spirit of the Ten Words (a.k.a, the Ten Commandments) was supplanted by rigid adherence to the hundreds of laws that were built on top of them. Later, during a period of exile, God says through Jeremiah that a new covenant will be made, that the law will be written upon our hearts (our conscience and intuitive sense of the divine) so that no one will "have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the LORD" (Jer 31:33-34). And even then, God's people seem to have lost their way. It's so easy for us (original sin?) to retreat into our own little worlds and habits and listen to the voices of greed, aversion, and delusion rather than the voices of love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

This is where Jesus enters the picture, the word (logos) of God in the flesh, who points the way to God, to the very heart of the law itself, which is simply "love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind," and "love your neighbour as yourself" (Mt 22:37-40). But even today, we're still struggling with our own Pharisees (e.g., in the form of conservative priests and bishops who cling to their worldly power and pages of canon law) and our own idols, whether in the form of money or our own egoism.

Reading the Gospels and spending time talking about them with people like Barbara, I'm more impressed than ever with Jesus as a prophet and spiritual teacher. His teachings were radical, challenging the religious legalism of his day with the simple yet powerful message of love, and I know in my heart that it's right.