HE IS RISIN

Easter is not my favorite holiday, not by a long shot. But I like spring time and I like what goes with it. Long ago when I first signed onto Face Book, when I only had a dozen friends and they were all family; a guy who grew up with my kids friended me so I clicked on ‘accept’ and grew my list of friends to 13. Come Easter, he posted an all-Caps exhortation that; “HE IS RISEN’, followed by his own personal-revelation-witness that after all, God is good. I don’t remember him as being particularly religious but then he married a holy-moly wife and that can make a good guy go weird. That was my best guess anyway and I unfriended him. 

I belong to a church where tolerance isn’t enough. You can tolerate bad breath and bad manners but they still suck. My church says, “accept people as they are.” You don’t have to agree with their propaganda but you understand they are doing the best they can. If you want to grow you have to be willing to be uncomfortable, so you accept. It goes without saying that you challenge everything, even what you understand and believe. Challenge doesn't mean reject or dismiss, it means engage. In my religion, all religion is metaphor and you understand; your prayers go out unaddressed. It is natural as rain and rational as cooperation; what we can neither deny nor understand, we create stories to make it digestible. Metaphor! It’s how the brain facilitates the mind. Knowledge isn’t enough; faith isn’t enough. It’s how we juggle all the balls in our experience, the joy of life with the anguish of mortality.

Maybe I shouldn’t have unfriended the guy, he was just sharing what makes him feel complete. But that day, it was too much for me and we never were really friends. My Belief system tells me that religion is hard wired into the neural network. It’s like radar, always looking for a contact that may or may not be there. I don’t tolerate religion, I embrace it. Nothing is more human. I can wrap both my head and my heart around Islam and Hinduism, around Buddha and Judaism, around Catholic and Evangelical. My religion tells me all religion has at least something to serve the greater good and that any religion can be exploited to an unholy purpose. But if it’s what one needs then they should have it; like a drug to ease pain and calm the spirit, maybe even a touch of euphoria. But if you want me to go there with you on Face Book, forget it.