Posted on 04/25/2007 6:54:31 AM PDT by NYer
“WOW -- coming from RC tradition I thought I’d never return to the Rosary. But here it is and here SHE IS. Blessed be, Mairly.”
The “here” in this message, found on herchurch.org, is Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco. But the SHE is not the Mother of God. SHE is “God/dess.”
On Wednesdays at 7 p.m., Ebenezer opens its sanctuary for the “Christian Goddess Rosary.” The church says it offers “Goddess Rosary Beads” and that “prayers and suggested meditations will be on hand as well as incense, candles and bells.”
“The Goddess rosary is grounded in traditions of the Christian Church and the proclamation of the gospel which is a vision of release from bondage for a new creation,” says the church’s web site.
The Goddess Rosary page on herchurch.org says that though “God as Father plays an important role” in Christian tradition, its “exclusive emphasis... contributes to a limited understanding of God, an understanding that supports a domination structure that oppresses and subordinates women.” Jesus used “Abba” as a “revolutionary deconstruction of domination structures of his day in both religious and social institutions.” The modern task is to do the same with “Goddess.”
Ebenezer, however, does not want to eradicate masculine images of God but to balance them with feminine images to “confront the biblical texts, products of their day and cultures, for the blatant patriarchal biases and misogynist attitudes.” And herchurch.org cites three Catholic theologians in support this confrontation: Harvard’s Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Fordham University’s Sister Elizabeth Johnson, and Rosemary Radford Ruether (who will lecture students in the course, “The History of God in Feminist Theological Discourse,” at LA’s Mount St. Mary’s College this spring.) Ruether calls the exclusive use of male imagery for God “idolatry.”
Herchurch.org offers a “Hail Goddess” prayer by feminist theologian Carol Christ, formerly of Harvard Divinity School but now director of the Ariadne Institute for Myth and Ritual in Greece. The prayer goes: “Hail Goddess full of grace. Blessed are you and blessed are all the fruits of your womb. For you are the MOTHER of us all. Hear us now and in all our needs. O blessed be, O blessed be. Amen.”
“I felt that I had stepped into a Presence, like a mother’s warm embrace,” wrote Dalyn Cook of Ebenezer’s Goddess Rosary. “The attendees were few in number, yet there was a sense of fullness in this welcoming space. I inhaled deeply the earthy scent of the incense, sending up delicate tendrils of smoke which curled around the altar in a nimbus visible against the warm rays of the evening sun filtering through the stained-glass windows....
“From the basket of rosaries, I took into my hand a strand of vibrantly-colored beads with a silver goddess icon in place of the traditional cross. The goddesses came in a variety of shapes and sizes, celebrating the beauty of the feminine form; I found reflections of my own figure in the full hips and Rubenesque curves of my goddess,” Cook wrote.
Many have asserted hereon that
to pray TO graduated saints
is an insult, affront to Jesus and His shed Blood, perhaps blasphemy, rebellion against Him.
That’s our perspective. We find it a Biblical one.
MMV
Exactly right. Weird pagans break off from a Church which broke off from a Church which broke off from Rome -- but they have BEADS! That makes what they do OUR FAULT!
Of course Evangelicals broke off from a Church which broke off from a Church which broke off from Rome, but we don't get any credit for that. We just plain can't win for losing. Of course Evangelicals don't have beads. Maybe that's it .....
I'm just trying to understand the argument here .....
As I have said more than once on these threads, the word "pray" is equivocal. IN it's root meaning it just means to request. It is used so in some court documents to this day.
Another sense includes activities which are not petitionary, but might include meditation on a biblical text, thanksgiving, songs of praise, and more. In this sense the word is used about communication between folks in this here empirical vale of tears and God.
Now, it seems that to make a request of anyone is not intrinsically wrong. And to ask someone to pray for one is not wrong, to judge by the requests for prayers one hears Protestants make as much as Catholics.
So the problem seems to be when one "prays" to a person who has shuffled off the mortal coil for that person's prayers, or praises that person for his or her former support through prayer or for other excellences.
The Luke citation is only about a gulf which does not prohibit communication between the rich man and Abraham, but is, within the framework of the parable put there to prevent travel from the rich mans' side to Abraham's or vice versa.
So even if that gulf were shown to be between us and Abraham's side, there would seem to be no argument against communication being able to cross the gulf. But the gulf, as has already been pointed out, is not between US and Lazarus but between the good guy dead folks and the bad guy dead folks, so it's not clearly relevant, t least not that I can see.
I made this argument without help from the magicsterical, by the way.
And finally, we KNOW what you assert. We differ, and we see no argument which addresses what we profess and shows it to be wrong. We see plenty which address slanders about us, and things which we ourselves repudiate. Assertions are not conclusive or dispositive.
What may look like facetious references to the "mortal coil" and the "vale of tears" are in fact efforts to avoid using descriptive terms for "dying" or "this plane of existence" which might turn out to be prejudicial one way or another to the argument.
You appealed to your professional status to justify some behavior, but when asked for more in depth information about your qualifications then all of a sudden it's behavior that everybody does -- except that you do it a little better than the average bear.
You brought up your professional qualifications. I asked what they were and how they related to your interests -- and how and in what way a profession whose representative organization endorses perversion and vice is relevant to your conduct on a thread in which you claim to defend a bona fide version of the gospel against haughty and potentially blasphemous RCs.
I'd like to ask now, why you brought them up, and who the others who know them are. I mean I know Jesus knows them, but who are the people to whom I can send emails?
The issue of my perspective as a Phd in clinical psych is only an order of magnitude or so beyond that of average folks. So you are about ten times better than average folks at knowing what people REALLY mean? And, I'm not clear, are you a Ph.D. now or are you a candidate for a PH.D.?
Thank you for your clarifications.
Don’t think I have a lot to add.
I still find, believe and have observed that it is spiritually hazardous to focus ANY prayers on ANYONE OR ANYTHING
other than
THE TRINITY.
I received my PhD and was voted by my profs and classmates into the WHO’S WHO thing between 1978 and 1980.
I have no intention of being more specific than that.
Folks can take my perspective and comments about what in my background contributes to such a perspective at face value, or not.
If deep rooted, ?life-long? anger, hostility, bias, attitude, education, associations, dreams, fantasies or whatever precludes such an attitude or perspective on my perspective, then I have no recourse but to accept that. Goes with the territory.
But you are welcome to continue to poke away in whatever way(s) prove cathartic, or not, for you.
“I’m just trying to understand the argument here .....”
It’s obvious, these “goddess folk” are all about “the I, the me, the we and the us”. No doctrine is sacred. No tradition is below their contempt. I would expect that Catholics, Protestants and all people of faith would be united in opposition to such nonsense. Certainly, while I may not agree with doctrine of other denominations I would be supportive of our Christian brothers and sisters in opposing attacks on the things that they hold dear by a group of secular humanist wackjobs parading as mainline Lutherans. It’s the right thing to do.
As for the foodfight, I don’t worry about such things anymore. I used to be THE defender of the Faith until it became apparent to me that the folks with whom I constantly seemed to be defending the Faith from wanted little or nothing to do with my apologia. There are many Evangelicals out there with whom we can stand shoulder to shoulder with, sharing the things that we have in common regarding our faith in Christ. It’s just that they’ll go unnoticed because they simply don’t get all bent out of shape over the Blessed Mother, the Saints or the “one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.”
Often, pride is at the core of such discussions, in which matters of faith are turned into “gotchas” and “scoring points”. At times, when I spoke out in defense of the Universal Church it had more to do with me proving something to myself than it had to do with sharing my faith with others, in retrospect I was at fault.
On the other side, a good many of the folk who sought to undermine my spiritual journey were simply using the format of discussion to shore up their own wayward arguments; more than a few would be revealed as bitter ex-Catholics with an ax to grind or a chip on the shoulder. It seems like I could only ever be drawn out into ferry little, blood pressure raising exchanges with such people. I don’t bother anymore.
Is it good to engage? Sure. When open hearts and minds are speaking truth with love, at other times one might feel that they were responding to some providential calling, possibly to be “the messenger” for others. If it's right, you’ll know when this is.
Peace.
I see, so you reject the notion that someone can be alive in Christ.
Getting personal aren't we?
I say again: YOU brought up your background to explain your evident preference for ad hominem responses over actually dealing with the argument.
Evidently the psychologically and spirit-filled view is that it is okay, even a duty for you to mock elements of OUR faith and practice and to call us defensive when we respond to childishly repeated attacks and perseverative incantations of Scripture. However responding to YOUR arguments is "poking". YOU can say "magicsterical" and the rest because you are only trying to get us to cast off the shackles of superstitious Romanism. You're only trying to help! (God protect me from such help.) But it's poking and the manifestation of seething anger if WE poke back
Thus Ph.D. disease raises its ugly head, "YOU can't disagree with ME! I have a doctorate! I do as I please and give account to no one! I make the rules!"
In your studies, between the space aliens and whatnot, did you find a place where someone establishes the equivalence of
(A) a gulf fixed between the no-longer-in-the-flesh Lazarus and Abraham on the one hand and the ditto "Dives", a gulf over which communication IS possible but travel is not ...
with
(B) A gulf fixed between the living and the dead over which communication is not possible.
You were assuring us that God Himself told us there was the gulf described in (b) but you only offered (A). So I need some evidence that two things so seemingly different are in fact the same thing.
Of course, my request for back up to your argument may be seen as hostile. Not much I can do about that. Projective techniques and all, y'know ...
Folks can take my perspective and comments about what in my background contributes to such a perspective at face value, or not.
Okay, let's see if I get this: We should take at face value what you say to justify your not taking what we say at face value. May we know why the rules which you apply to us do not apply to you, or is "this knowledge too much for us" (as the Psalmist says ...)?
Read Luke 16 for an account of the gulf fixed. The rich man communicated to Abraham, but was unable to transport between the two places.
Times have changed. We are a far graver problem than pagans pretending to be Christians. WE are so terrible a problem that we MUST be mocked, and no attempt to understand what we truly think must be made because it's like we're infectious. Roosevelt allied with Stalin to stop Hitler. This chunk of our FR separated brethren would, in the same situation, blame Stalin on Hitler and ally with Hitler to wipe out Stalin. They think we are the focus of evil in the modern world.
Often, pride is at the core of such discussions, in which matters of faith are turned into “gotchas” and “scoring points”. At times, when I spoke out in defense of the Universal Church it had more to do with me proving something to myself than it had to do with sharing my faith with others, in retrospect I was at fault.
Yep! that's the tragedy. They force the conversation there. They cannot suppress their disdain and disgust for us, and feel morally obliged to repeat, over and over again, repetitiously, and possibly even redundantly, that trusting God's promise to the Church could be hazardous to our Spiritual health. The use of mocking terms is a bonus.
Peace.
They are not interested in peace. We are an evil so great that we simply must be repudiated at every opportunity, and others warned against it.
Of course, all in a spirit of brotherhood ....
Specifically, Lazarus was unable to take a drop of water to the rich man.
BUT, when the rich man asks that Lazarus be sent to His brothers, the argument is NOT, "That's impossible - there's a great gulf fixed," but rather, "They won't listen."
As I tried to indicate, I did read it. I still don't see a text showing its relevance to communication between us on earth and the saints in heaven. It would be hard even to make the "They won't listen," argument apply.
I see no relevance. What specifically am I missing?
"Graduated"... Is that a Scriptural term?
Yes, you know, we struggle to keep up with your exalted and "graduated" (in the sense of degree-ed) understanding, and we have succeeded to the point of "getting" that you all think there is something very wrong about asking somebody else to pray for one.
We can ask a saint to "obtain" something for us and you somehow think that demonstrates that we weren't asking for prayers.
So let's look at that:
Sissie goes downstairs to ask Mommy for a cookie. Bubba says,'Hey, get one for me too please?" But because he said "get" rather than "ask" (even though the situation clearly indicates that that's what he must have meant) for those who just KNOW that RCs are messed up, that's enough to show that Bubba's was not asking Sissie to make a request. Oh the penetrating insight into others of our helpful brethren!/sarc
Now let's look at the prayer which you adduced as an example of our desire to turn away from God. What is it we are asking the saint to "obtain" for us?"
Obtain for us then a deep hatred of sin and that purity of heart which will attach us to God alone so that out every thought, word and deed may tend to His greater glory. [thanks to the friend who pointed this out to be and emphasis added.]Yep, if there's one thing we can say with certainty about this prayer, it is that the prayer is composed and prayed by people who want nothing so much as to insult, give affront to, blaspheme and rebel against God. /sarc.
The insult and affront to, blasphemy of, and rebellion against reason and the plain meaning of words we will leave to the graduated among us.
Projective techniques (and the projection they encourage) abound!
No. It depends. imho, If the shoe does NOT fit, then I'm not mocking that individual's faith. I have repeatedly asserted that I believe it's a minority of RC's. I've even guesstimated 5-25% or maybe it was 5-15%.
As to taking things at face value--it depends, too. We all have our criteria for what is convincing to us. If my face value is worthless, then, by all means, avoid being convinced.
As to extrapolating from gulf A to gulf B . . . it seems to me that RC's love to extrapolate, infer, assume more than any other denomination I know of. And every shred of extrapolation, inference, assumption is enshrined literally in centuries of custom, dogma, magicsterical edicts etc. which the faithful are either expected or given to treating as Holy Writ from Mt Sinai. The whole Mary edifice is probably 99% inference, assumption and extrapolation.
I realize, of course, that assumption, inference and extrapolation are ONLY HOLY WHEN RC'S DO IT. But, I'm human enough to do it anyway.
Faulty Mariology = faulty Christology
yields:
Mary = Christ
Talk about inference, assumption and extrapolation! That's quite a leap that I do NOT think Christ is well pleased about.
BTW, vengeance is not a pretty thing. God also insist's it's His turf exclusively.
BTW, I would be interested in the RC perspective on the historical excerpt from LaHaye's book above. I did not realize that the origin of the images was from the Greek etc. idols from Rome's pagan past. Evidently the Scriptural pattern of utterly destroying ANY idols was rebelled against and ignored by the early leaders. Doesn't sound remotely Biblical OR Christian, to me.
That's simmply not true.
Yes, there are elements of the RC edifice which many of us are convinced are eternally deadly to some sorts of people. I have not identified any such individuals because I don't know. I prefer to leave that to God's turf unless He gives me a specific order to warn a specific individual that they've crossed over some line. But that would be for a non-FR context, anyway. My peace here is to abide by forum rules about avoiding making things personal.
The RC folks feel similarly about some elements of various Proty denominations. When they warn or even pontificate out of caring hearts--it's touching and I'm not THAT bothered even when they get shrill.
But, for me, I'm talking about a centuries ancient edifice, organization, system of man, structure, etc. and the hazards I am utterly convinced that certain elements of it present to some types of more vulnerable folks. And, some of us feel it is our duty to state our perspective--particularly in the face of very vigorous and often shrill RC presentations. The lurkers deserve to have both sides to consider.
I've actually grown in my affections for the most shrill RC's hereon. I have a lot of respect for their zeal. Am not about to roll over and play dead re some of what I consider their sillier notions. But I can still respect a lot about them. They don't have to agree with me about a lot of things to still merit my respect and affections.
My best guess is that the angst is not about me nor about my satire. It appears much deeper and longer standing.
I wish, at this time, that I had something more useful to add. But, I don’t.
I don't at all understand the motive for "Catholic bashing." I do understand that to be on the receiving end of it can be quite painful. It fills me with sorrow to find co-religionists quarrelling instead of supporting one another, as God has asked us to do. 'Nuff said.
Much appreciated. Thanks.
If they’re on earth and still living, I certainly don’t reject it.
If they’re on earth and still living, I certainly don’t reject it.
Ok, so you do reject the idea that people who have passed from this life can be alive in Christ. You are, of course, entitled to whatever beliefs you wish to hold, but it's different for us Christians.
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