There’s this idea called dualism, and it has a long history in philosophy and religion. It exists today in interesting ways and was a concept that was fairly prevalent in the Jesus movement of the 1st century. The idea is this: there are two ways to live – earthly (sinful) and heavenly (not sinful). The body and all that comes with it is denigrated – it is something to be controlled and denied – while the Spirit is to be nurtured and grown. This is one of the reasons the Apostle Paul was so against sex; he wrote that if followers of Jesus were too immature to abstain from sex, they should go ahead and marry, because “it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” (1 Cor. 7: 8-9). My opinion is that this is why the Christian movement has had such an issue with sex of any kind – think, Immaculate Conception – and why so many Christians can’t find balance. Instead of being happy with who God made us to be, we often behave in unhealthy and dangerous ways.
Jesus, on the other hand, seemed to have a healthy and balanced approach to this kind of thing. He had no problem with marriage; remember the water to wine thing at the wedding He and His family and friends attended? He also spoke about people being eunuchs for the kingdom of God. He was, we are taught, celibate, but Peter had a mother-in-law and was married at some point. In many of today’s churches, however, a lot of time is spent preaching one way of being sexual and one way of expressing gender, and all others are condemned. As a follower of Jesus, I think we need a better way of dealing with the diversity of sexualities and genders, because the prevalence of hatred around these things is destroying us. I wonder how different our experience of life would be if people stopped harassing others about being different and started spending more time, say, feeding children and housing the homeless?
Imagine the sea-change that would take place if we taught children to embrace who God made them to be? Imagine if we taught kids how to have healthy relationships with each other and their own bodies? I don’t know why I am the gender I am, but I do know that I don’t want to be different because I’m happy with me. I don’t know why, when puberty hit me, I was attracted to females and not males, but I do know that it wasn’t a choice – it just came naturally. Think of all the mayhem being created around who people should love and how people should live? Meanwhile, these same people focused on policing who this are telling the world that God blesses war and loves our country more than others. I think our priorities are totally messed up. Jesus never told us to hate people for their differences; in fact, He told us to love them, regardless of who they are. Instead of spending all of this energy on earthly hatred, maybe we could focus more on nurturing our Spirits and loving people. That would, I think, be a much better next step in our spiritual journeys.
Prayer – Merciful God, may Your real needs overwhelm our made-up biases so that peace might reign. Amen.
Today’s art is “Dualism” by Seshadri Sreenivasan.