Yeah this is going to work

So there's a post over on neurotheologythat says:

Between May 17 and June 28, 2009, groups of LGBT and allied people around the country will attend worship services at the church of their choice wearing a lapel button that reads “gay? fine by me.” For less formal churches we also have a t-shirt with this message. The lapel button (or t-shirt) serves as a conversation starter – opening dialogue with people in the church about faith, sexual orientation, and gender identity. When that visible act of courage is paired with adequate training, then transforming hearts and minds becomes a bona fide possibility. That’s why we’ve designed this web page, as well as a three-part teleconference course that covers the essentials of Nonviolent communication, Media talking points, and What both the Bible and science really say about homosexuality. Those training teleconferences will be held on April 19, April 26, and May 3 at 4pm CST and are open to all our volunteers for this project. We hope you will consider organizing a Sundays of Solidarity project in your area. It simply involves choosing a church in your area that could benefit from an SOS visit, using your contact list to recruit others to join you, attending the teleconference training sessions, and then organizing your group to take action on a date, time, and church location of your choosing.

The training starts in a few days, don't miss it! If you haven't signed up yet, visit http://www.soulforce.org to sign up.

and I actually think this is an outstandingly bad idea. Going into a community that you don't belong to and telling them that they are doing things wrong is just going to royally piss people of and entrench their positions. It is also going to make them feel attacked and so feel that they are righteous in their prejudice. This really, really isn't going to work.

I really firmly believe that you can only change communities from the inside, if you try to do it from the outside you trigger a siege mentality, which means it is up to me and people like me who are either queer Christians or Christians who are queer allies to change things in the church. its going to be a long haul and its going to be hard work, but we absolutely have a responsibility to do it.

Land and spirituality

The rise of industrialisation and the fact that the state religion is a specif brand of christianity, means that we are really disconnected from the land, unless we work it for a living or we actively choose a spiritual path that is land conscious and land honouring (and even then i think it often pans out as something more metaphorical than a practical. physical relationship with the land.)We don't wake with the dawn, we don't eat seasonally, we don't think about how what we use and what we waste effects the land.

Land has always been important to me. the house I grew up in backed on to farmland and nature reserves, so I grew up being intimately equated with life cycles and year cycles: when the fields were fertilized, when the lambs were born, when the sheep were shorn, when the crops were harvested, when the fruit fell from the trees, when the nests were built and the eggs were laid, when the caterpillars became butter flies,when the leaves turned to flame, the long stretch of cold dormant wintertime


I am made from the land I have lived in, the land I Have loved. My feet are made from chalk and flint. The waters from the Test, the Itchen, the Avon, the Towy and Swansea bay run through my bloodstream. I'm really sensitive to weather patterns, I can tell when its going to rain, snow or thunder, if its foggy in the mornings I know weather it will stay foggy all day or if it will burn off.

I think that whatever religion we are we all need to carry around with us an acute awareness that,regardless of our thoughts on the afterlife, that we come from the land and we go back to the land, and if we do not honour the land then we are not honouring our selves or those that come after us.

Christianity has been notoriously bad at land honouring, partly because I think any religion that becomes a state religion is always used as a way to gain power and money and partly because of various interpretations of christianity as god being outside/away from the world and the rejection of the material world. I do think god is outside the world, but not in an off to the side looking on way. I believe god contains the universe inside herself



so that god not only made the system but is part of the system and everything we have, own, are is part of god.


somehow the phrase "of the world" came to mean sinful, unspiritual but from where I'm standing in this lifetime/incarnation/part of the circle our physicality is the most important part of who we are. Everything about us is mediated through our physicality so being physical beings is part of our spiritual experience.

I really think we as humans really need to connect back to the land, back to the year cycles. Even if we can only do that in small ways, even if we live in city sprawl we can grow window boxes, watch the sunrises and sunsets, maybe eat seasonally, take photographs of trees at intervals through the year so we become aware of how they change with the circle.

But we need to not romanticise the land either, surviving on the land and tending the land is hard work and the land doesn't care what happens to us. it is not our friend. it is not a benevolent entity. Viewing it as a benevolent mother goddess figure is far too simplistic. (As far as I know all cultures that have/had the idea of a mother/fertility goddess embeded in them, also had the same goddess as a war/chaos/destruction goddess.) But this is the land, it is the only thing we have and if we don't tend it, look after it listen to it, our spirituality, and with it, our humanity will be irevocably damaged.