InnerBliss: Taking Back that Hooker-Hugging Hippie

The Fall Garden: The Last Rose, which
will surely be gone after this rain/snow/ice mix.

Listening to: This because I like the line "Where I stop that's where you begin."

Bliss: Wonderful friends gathering this past Saturday to eat food and drink wine and celebrate my coming 40th. Wonderful, loving friends who embrace us completely.

Since Election Day, and especially over the past week, some of the conversations on blogs' comments have been utterly frightening and eye opening.

It seems that Proposition 8 has been an excuse for the haters on this planet to emerge from their dark, dank closets, which is fine because I've always believed that open hate is easier to deal with than that secret kind that boils under the surface or wears masks in public. I think if you are a hater, you should let it all hang out so the rest of us know what we are up against.

But what really bothers me is that these haters are emerging from their closets carrying the cross.

It makes me want to puke.

But not necessarily why you think.

It makes me want to puke for the damage it does to what Christianity really is and should be. It makes me want to puke because it gives the intellectuals and the radicals and the liberals of my own day and age even more reason to push Christianity away, to say things like "well, that's organized religion for you," or to run away to Eastern religions as if Christianity weren't an Eastern religion that happened to migrate.

What I wish would happen instead? I wish we (because I include myself in this group) -- the liberals and the intellectuals and the radicals of my own day and age -- would take this religion back from the clutches of the haters.

I wish we would all stand up and declare Christianity off limits for anyone who doesn't get the basic message of love and compassion.

I wish our kind would fill the pews and the aisles and the choirs and let our voices ring with the true power of this Hooker-Hugging Hippie's message.

I wish we would stop letting the haters drive us out of what is rightfully ours.

Christ was a radical who died for his espousal of tolerance and love for all; he was killed because he sat down to dinner with the outsiders of his time; he himself was hated and feared because he taught us that God was not the war-monger of the Old Testament but rather a loving father who wanted nothing more or less than to take care of us.

How dare we allow the haters to take over his name? To take over the churches named after him? We have failed him miserably; he dies over and over for our failure.

Yes, religions are human made institutions in response to the lives of great teachers. So why allow the haters to determine the shape of these institutions? Why allow the haters to deform this great teacher's vision?

Why abandon him to them?

As I used to sing in my grandmother's church when I was very small, "Jesus loves me, this I know."

And no one can tell me any different.

It is time to call for another reformation, and this time, the reformation must be one of love. It is time to take Christianity back as a path toward individual enlightenment that leads to a community of compassionate thinkers and creators -- the heaven on earth that Christ spoke of most people being blind to.

It is time to expose the haters for what they are: liars drunk on power.

Did you know, for example, that the Mormon church (the church that poured 20 million dollars into prop 8 and sent their children to school with hate sloganed t-shirts) was founded by a man who took three "disciples" into the woods, starved them for a week, and then used their "visions" to justify his claim to a new found "bible," a bible composed of bits and pieces that he had most likely heard and seen in small plays that were traveling through towns he had been in. Did you know this Mormon "Bible" contains bits of Shakespeare? I'm not sure that that actually qualifies as "divine revelation."

And that is just the tip of that particular Hate Iceberg.

Cults like this must no longer be allowed to claim Christ for their own.

He is ours. Christ belongs to the down trodden. Christ belongs to the outsiders. Christ belongs to those willing to walk the most difficult path of all -- that of love for the other.

He calls us to strip away our preconceived notions, to rid ourselves of judgement and intolerance, to work at ourselves like great sculptors work on marble -- getting rid of anything that is in the way of the beautiful essence.

Christ was not a rule follower or a rule maker. He actually asked that people break rules that they took for granted as "good." Give away everything (hello, redistribution of wealth!), leave your family, follow me, he said. He asked that we do the hardest things of all. Because we aren't here to be cozy and comfortable -- that does not encourage growth of any kind.

He also said that the poor would always be with us, and as this Proposition 8 discussion so clearly illustrates, he was speaking not only of the materially poor but of the poor of love, the poor of spirit, the poor of compassion -- the kind of which we have an obvious overabundance.