Celebrating the Risen Christ - Old Catholic Style

My friend Bob, who is a priest in the Old Catholic tradition, is currently in Europe visiting a number of Old Catholic communities.

When he was recently in Prague, I helped arrange a meeting between him and fellow gay Catholic blogger (and Prague resident) Jayden Cameron, of Gay Mystic. Jayden, in turn, recently wrote about his experience of the Easter Vigil at Prague’s Old Catholic Cathedral of St. Lawrence.

Following, with his permission, is Jayden’s post about his experience of Old Catholicism.

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He is Risen – Within the Old Catholic Church

By Jayden Cameron

Gay Mystic
April 4, 2010

I attended the Easter Vigil last night at the 'Old Catholic' Cathedral of St. Lawrence high atop Petrin Hill in Prague. Father Robert Caruso of the US is here in Prague for the week and invited me to the service.

The “Old” Catholic Church is so named because this community believes it represents the true Catholic tradition before Vatican I and the imposed dogma of Papal Infallibility. The community did not willingly split from the Roman branch, it was excommunicated when a number of Bishops in good conscience decided they could not accept the decision of Vatican I to declare the Pope infallible. In fact the majority of Bishops walked out of the Council in protest before the vote could be taken. The reigning pontiff, Pius IX, a deeply disturbed human being whom a number of psychiatric authorities have diagnosed as a classic sociopath, threatened excommunication and interdict to any bishop and diocese who did not agree with the decision. Most of the dissenting bishops gave in at great cost to their consciences. But a significant and prophetic remnant stood fast These bishops together with their dioceses then banded together to form the Old Catholic Church and they have been living their marginal, Spirit filled witness-in-exile, ever since.

Outside of the control of the Vatican, the worldwide community of the Old Catholic Church then evolved in a (not surprisingly) healthy manner and we now have a Church which images the Catholic Church as she should be - inclusive, tolerant, fair = with women priests and married priests, gay marriages and ethical decisions regarding contraception (among others) left to the individual consciences of the married couple. No scandals regarding child abuse have surfaced within the Old Catholic Church. Does that surprise anyone?



Father Robert Caruso is the tall priest in the center of the photo (taken with my cell phone). For those who are more interested in this community, you can read a review of Father Robert's book, The Old Catholic Church: Understanding the Origin, Essence, and Theology of a Church that is Unknown and Misunderstood by Many in North America, and a series of interviews with him at Michael Bayly's blogsite, The Wild Reed.

I was deeply moved by the service (despite the terminally long readings, following the Roman ritual exactly) and I have to say it ‘felt’ exactly like a Roman Catholic Liturgy – with one important distinction. At communion, all of the priests, the presiding Bishop and the ministers, received communion last – after all of the ‘laity’ had themselves partaken. Wow! What a stunning example of a ministry of service that does not privilege the ordained. As Father Robert remarked, “It isn’t just ‘like’ the Catholic Mass – ala the Anglican service – it is the Catholic Mass.” I have to agree. Seven new catechumens and one charmingly distraught baby girl received baptism this evening, and the adults went on to receive Confirmation and First Communion as well. It was a very deeply moving sight to see, and the entire evening was Spirit-filled in an atmosphere of peace and joy. It was a delightfully eclectic community and I was on the receiving end of some wonderful and warmly humorous comments about gays within the community. I have never felt so graciously accepted as a gay man at any other form of Catholic service. I will be celebrating with this community again.

This morning I watched Pope Benedict’s Urbi et Orbi homily on Eurotelevision and I felt that the role of the ‘Supreme Pontiff’ in all of his pomp and regalia was in no way more charismatic or significant than the very impressive, deeply spiritual Bishop Dusan Hejbal of the Old Catholic Church of Prague.


For more about Old Catholicism, see the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Understanding the Old Catholic Church (Part 1)
• Understanding the Old Catholic Church (Part 2)
• Understanding the Old Catholic Church (Part 3)
• Robert Caruso’s Scholarly Introduction to Old Catholicism
• The Old Catholic Church: Catholicism Beyond Rome – An interview with Robert Caruso.
• The Declaration of Utrecht

Images: Jayden Cameron.

Donohue's "Blame the Gays" Tactic Refuted by John Jay Study Researcher

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the obnoxious and more-often-than-not erroneous rhetoric of folks like Catholic League president Bill Donohue can actually serve some good.

How so, you ask? Well, it can compel people who actually know what they’re talking about to come forward and calmly refute the ignorance and/or lies that form the basis of such rhetoric by offering a rational presentation of the facts.

Take for instance Margaret Smith, a John Jay College criminologist who was one of the researchers responsible for the study of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church - a study commissioned by the U.S. Conference of [Roman] Catholic Bishops and released in 2004.

Smith was recently interviewed for the following article by Jeremy Schulman of Media Matters. Make no mistake, this article is a must-read for anyone interested in ascertaining the true nature of the Roman Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse crisis.

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Expert: Donohue’s Claim that Most
Abusive Priests are Gay is “Unwarranted”

By Jeremy Schulman

MediaMatters.org
April 2, 2010

One of the researchers responsible for a landmark statistical study of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church says that Catholic League president William Donohue “drew an unwarranted conclusion” from her work when he claimed that “most” of the clergy who committed the abuse have been “gay.”

In a March 30 ad published in The New York Times, Donohue described the sex abuse scandal as a “homosexual crisis.” Donohue added: “Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.”

During a March 31 appearance on CNN, Donohue elaborated on his claim, specifically citing a 2004 study produced by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which found that 81 percent of the alleged victims of sexual abuse by priests were male. During the CNN segment, Donohue repeated his assertion that “most of the molesters have been gay.”

But in an interview with Media Matters, Margaret Smith – a John Jay College criminologist who worked on the 2004 study – said that while Donohue “quoted the study’s data correctly,” he “drew an unwarranted conclusion” in asserting that most of the abusers were gay.

Explaining that it is an oversimplification to assume to that priests who abuse male victims are gay, Smith said: “The majority of the abusive acts were homosexual in nature. That participation in homosexual acts is not the same as sexual identity as a gay man.”

As an example, Smith pointed to the case of Marcial Maciel Degollado, a prominent Mexican priest who allegedly abused male children and also allegedly carried on affairs with multiple women. Smith noted that while Maciel allegedly abused boys, most people would not think of him as a gay man.

In a November 18, 2009, Politics Daily column about Smith’s research, David Gibson reported:

“What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse,” said Margaret Smith, a researcher from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is conducting an independent study of sexual abuse in the priesthood from 1950 up to 2002. “At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse.”

A second researcher, Karen Terry, also cautioned the bishops against making a correlation between homosexuality in the priesthood and the high incidence of abuse by priests against boys rather than girls – a ratio found to be about 80-20.

“It’s important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior,” Terry said. “Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity.” Terry said factors such as greater access to boys is one reason for the skewed ratio. Smith also raised the analogy of prison populations where homosexual behavior is common even though the prisoners are not necessarily homosexuals, or cultures where men are rigidly segregated from women until adulthood, and homosexual activity is accepted and then ceases after marriage.

Such conclusions, moreover, are not unique to analyses of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. As Think Progress noted, Gregory Herek, a psychology professor at the University of California-Davis, analyzed a number of studies and concluded: “The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children. This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so.”


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Blaming the Gays
An Offering of Ashes

Quote of the Day

I learned a long time ago that I can’t control the challenges the creator sends my way, but I can control the way I think about them and deal with them.

– Wilma Mankiller
Quoted in the Associated Press article,
“Former Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller Dies”
April 6, 2010

Interiors XIII

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Quote of the Day

What’s needed is a conversion of the bishops and the pope himself. That’s right: It’s time for the pope and the bishops to convert their culture to one that is centered on loving God from the depths of their souls and to leading a church that is as much mother as father, as much pastoral as theological, as much spiritual as doctrinal. It is time for them to listen to the deep and authentic witness of the people of faith, to trust the spirit that blows where it will, to abandon their defensiveness of their positions and trust only the gospel, and not their edifice of control. Conversion is a total experience – letting go of the old and putting on the new.

The conversion we seek for them is the same conversion they invite for us: Put on a contrite heart and fall in love with God, recklessly, totally and passionately. Let the love of God be the only measure of their actions.

We live in a spiritual age, and until the bishops and the pope learn to lead a people hungry for authenticity, trust and spiritual nourishment, we will look elsewhere. There are millions of Catholics with deep spiritual wisdom – millions of faith-filled people who love God in transformative ways. We will trust their faith and witness if the bishops fail us.

– Timothy Shriver
“Can the Pope Restore the Purity of Catholicism?”
The Washington Post
April 5, 2010

Mississippi Adventure

On Holy Thursday afternoon last week, my friend Phil and I took advantage of the beautiful spring weather and spent time by that stretch of the Mississippi River just below the University of St. Thomas. As you can see, it's a very peaceful and picturesque part of St. Paul.

Right: "'Ere, what's that down there, then?"


Left: Phil. It was at the bluffs shown in these first two photos that we observed two eagles soaring majestically above us. They were quite a sight!

You may recall how last summer I accompanied my friends Kathleen & Joey, and John & Kathy and their three sons Noah, Cole, and Aaron to this same spot on the Mississippi. While at the foot of the bluffs that day we befriended a young boy named Darius, who expertly lead us through the nearby ravine to the natural spring that is the source of the area's creek.

Well, who should Phil and I encounter last Thursday but Darius! I'm beginning to think he's actually the embodied spirit of this particular part of the river!

Anyway, this time Darius led us to what was probably the last remnant of ice in St. Paul, located at the base of a waterfall, downstream from the main bluffs and near the river's shoreline.




Above: Darius and Phil.

Someone had left all kinds of stuff at the foot of this sandstone bluff - including unopened cans of pop, which Darius and Phil helped themselves to!



Above: My friends Tom and Sue, whom we also encountered last Thursday while exploring the Mississippi shoreline.



Above and below: The beautiful Mississippi River - Thursday, April 1, 2010.



See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
A Delightful Summer's Afternoon (and a Moving Tale)
River Walk
Down By the River
Karl Rahner on the Need for Prayer
Spring in Minnesota

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

The Cosmic Christ: Brother, Lover, Friend, Divine and Tender Guide

Concluding The Wild Reed’s special Holy Week 2010 series, I share today a seventh excerpt from Andrew Harvey’s 1998 book, Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ.

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Our greatest guide in [the journey of daring to “Christ” ourselves] will be the historical Christ, for it was the task of Jesus in time to birth the eternal Christ, who could help all other beings directly from the heart of divine power and divine grace. This means nothing less than adopting the historical Jesus’ fierce, humble, illusionless radicalism in every way and in every arena; nothing less will cost enough or strip us enough or awaken us sufficiently to the extent of the evil, ignorance, and suffering that make the transformation of the world into the Kingdom not a mystic dream but the most urgent of necessities.

Just as Jesus did in his time, we will have to fight with all our powers for the triumph of divine clarity, mercy, and justice; just as Jesus did, we will have to be prepared to excite and suffer derision, persecution, betrayal, abandonment; just as Jesus did, we will have to learn to pass through zone after zone of death and surrender; just as Jesus did, we will have to dedicate everything we learn and all we have and are to a deeper and ever-humbler service of all beings in the spirit of the all-encompassing compassion of Kingdom; just as Jesus did, we will have to be prepared to rest nowhere, and be ready always to dare to go deeper and deeper into the furnace of divine love, until we become, as Jesus has, one with its fire in all possible dimensions, now and forever.



We will, however, have one advantage that Jesus did not have: we will have Jesus himself, as the Cosmic Christ, to be our brother, lover, friend, divine and tender guide; we will have the Christ-force that streams forth from the heart of God toward humanity to inspire us; we will have the sign of his resurrection to give us the certainty that the impossible is possible; we will have the truth of his splendor in life and death and beyond continually to remind us of ours.

All those who risk Christing themselves know the truth of these words. Throughout Christian history, and often despite the church, the challenge to follow Jesus to and beyond the end has been taken up by beings who staked their lives not merely on following some version of Christ’s teaching but on submitting themselves to the same, almost intolerable, recognitions, pressures, vicissitudes, and passions as had so as to be “Christed” into the Kingdom with him. For them, Christ was far more than a teacher or sage or even divine icon; he was the pioneer of a wholly new kind of human being, one who wanted above all to become one with the glory of love and to be its selfless revolutionary in the night of history Brave and loving enough – and constantly inspired by divine grace – these heroic men and women took up Christ’s challenge – the challenge above all of the cross – and allowed themselves like him to be crucified into resurrection, killed into an eternal life dedicated utterly to love and the service of others, and to the birthing of the Kingdom in reality.

– Andrew Harvey
Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ
Pp. 85-86

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NOTE: Harvey observes that over the centuries, “these great lovers and brothers and sisters of Jesus discovered, with the help of the Cosmic Christ and divine grace, an ever-more accurate ‘map’ of how the transformation into Christhood could be accomplished.” The second part of Son of Man, entitled “The Mystical Christ,” details this map. It’s a map that “reveals just how the Christ-force can be unleashed at the heart of reality and how the human being can be transformed to stand its demands and incarnate its divine passion with ever-increasing, and ever-more radical, effectiveness.”


For previous installments of this series, see
Jesus: Path-blazer of Radical Transformation
The Essential Christ
One Symbolic Iconoclastic Act
One Overwhelming Fire of Love
The Most Dangerous Kind of Rebel
Resurrection: Beyond Words, Dogmas, and All Theological Formulations

See also the related Wild Reed post:
The Sacred Heart: Mystical Symbol of Love

Image 1: "Cosmic Christ" by Alex Gray (1999).
Image 2: "Sacred Heart" by Robert Lentz.

A Fact That Should Be Neither Surprising Nor Derogatory

The [Roman Catholic] clerical system is significantly homosexual in orientation. This fact should neither be surprising nor derogatory. The structure and culture of the Roman Catholic Church makes room and positive use of the great reservoir of talent represented in the gay community. But just as gay priests can be exemplary pastors some, too, can remain underdeveloped. Because such a large proportion of the clerical community – bishops and priests – is homosexual a greater proportion of the sexual abusers of minors are gay and their victims, male. . . . Psychosexually immature men are prone to select sexually immature partners. A substantial proportion of priests [fall in love] or become sexually involved with children or minors under the guise and self-delusion that they are being kind. . . . A significant number of Roman Catholic clergy are psychosexually immature. This has been studied and well documented. The church prefers men and women on this level of development for church service because they are easier to control – they tend to be idealistic, dependent, obedient to authority, in need of causes and devoted to people they feel are strong; underdeveloped people are responsive to well defined boundaries that make them feel special (superior) and secure.

– Richard Sipe
“The Vatican Connection:
Pedophilia and Celibacy”
March 18, 2010

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Blaming the Gays
• Report: Homosexuality No Factor in Abusive Priests
• Officially Homophobic, Intensely Homoerotic
• The Pope's "Scandalous" Stance on Homosexuality
• Homosexuality and the Priesthood
• Keeping All the Queens Under One Roof

Blaming the Gays

Even though about 80 percent of victims were boys, the John Jay researchers and other experts on sex offenders say it does not mean the perpetrators were gay. Priests had more access to boys, which likely explains the high percentage of male victims, researchers say.

– Associated Press
"Patterns of Clergy Sex Abuse Found in Study
Commissioned by American Catholic Bishops"
April 5, 2010

Andrew Sullivan has written a great piece that refutes the contention of Catholic League president Bill Donahue (right) that the Roman Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse crisis is, first and foremost, a “homosexual problem,” and not a pedophilia problem or leadership problem.

I just wish that Sullivan’s piece had been published last Wednesday (March 31) when I was interviewed via phone on Rick Sanchez’s CNN show, Rick’s List – along with Donohue!

I was basically asked to counter Donohue’s controversial perspective. Unfortunately, I was contacted to do so just 30 minutes before the show went to air, and so it was difficult to gather my thoughts into good, hard-hitting “sound bytes,” which are pretty much essential for those types of fast-paced talk shows. As much as I dislike Sullivan’s often domineering manner when on talk shows, that’s exactly what was needed - especially when up against the equally domineering (and abrasive) Bill Donohue. I was way too measured and polite. Still, friends who saw the show maintain I did okay. And I even got to make Donahue rant and rave at the end of our time together – something that actually anyone could do with half a cogent argument!

Here’s part of the transcript from last Wednesday’s show.

Rick Sanchez: I've given you [Bill Donahue] ample time to explain your viewpoint. I want to bring Michael in, because essentially what [Bill is saying is that] the real problem in the Catholic church is homosexuality, not so much the other. And, Michael, I’d like you to respond to that.

Michael Bayly, Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities: Thanks for having me on the show, Rick, and hello to Bill, too. Yes, I read Bill’s piece in The New York Times, and I guess I had two issues with it. One of them was, of course, the scapegoating of gay men and the confusion of homosexuality with pedophilia.

Rick Sanchez: How would you disagree with what he just said? He tried to be very clear to say that not all homosexuals are pedophiles. What Bill seems to be saying – and, Bill, I don’t want to speak for you – was the statistics* show that many of the priests who are gay have acted as pedophiles.

Bill Donahue: That’s right.

Michael Bayly: Well, um, if that’s true, you have to ask why is it that it’s in the Roman Catholic Church that that’s happened. And I think if it is an over-representation [of same-sex abuse], we have to look at what it is about the Roman Catholic Church and its understanding and teaching on homosexuality [that keeps some gay men in the priesthood in an underdeveloped psycho-sexual state].

Rick Sanchez: So, if there’s a – you’re saying if there’s a sexual deviancy problem, it’s the church’s fault for causing that, for bringing that about in the men who become priests? Is that what I hear you saying, Michael?

Michael Bayly: Well, we are all ultimately responsible for our own behavior. But I think the structure of the church [and] its way of thinking and talking about human sexuality are very dysfunctional.


Anyway, Sullivan’s take on this issue greatly expands on what I was trying to get at last week on Rick’s List. And, as you’ll see, he does so in a very clear and concise way.

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It’s the Gays’ Fault

By Andrew Sullivan

The Daily Dish
April 1, 2010

I figured we had gotten past this canard but since Bill Donohue is on every television and radio show loudly proclaiming that the church's abuses can be attributed to “homosexuals.” and therefore it is homosexuality and not the church that stands in the dock, it requires some unpacking.

Here’s Donohue’s valid point. In some of the reports on the sex abuse crisis, the impression is sometimes given that all the offenses are against children in the classic pedophile sense – pre-pubescent. The John Jay Report found that 22 percent of the cases of abuse in America were with children under the age of ten, 51% were between the ages of 11 and 14, and 15 percent were aged 16 or older. Eighty percent were same-sex abuse. So you can see how you can say that the majority of the cases were same-sex acts between men and male teens who were sexually past puberty. Hence, in Donohue’s blinkered eyes, the gays did it. And if we get rid of all the gays, we may be unfair to many of them, but at least we can get rid of the abuse.

But here’s why Donohue’s attempt to blame the crisis on homosexuals as such is so wrong. First, the critical issue is abuse, not orientation. The abuse of a young or teenage boy is no different in its nature than the abuse of a young or teenage girl. The sin is the abuse of power, and the use of religious authority to subject the defenseless to an adult’s sexual gratification. It’s about the power differential, and the still fragile nature of a developing psyche and sexuality. The sexual orientation of the perpetrator is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the matter at hand: an institution that sought to cover up, and protect rapists and molesters of minors. If we were talking about adult sexual relationships here, we could have a discussion about sexual orientation. But we’re not. We’re talking about abuse.

Secondly, and obviously, homosexuality is not abuse. It is an orientation that for the overwhelming majority involves consensual sex with adults. Some obvious attraction for teenage boys is as prevalent among gays as the obvious attraction for teenage girls for straight men. But there is no reason to correlate homosexuality with abuse, pederasty or pedophilia.

The real question is: what kind of gay man molests children and young teens? Just as: what kind of straight man molests children and young teens? What leads to this kind of behavior which is far from the norm among homosexuals and heterosexuals? And why does the Catholic Church priesthood seem such a magnet for child rapists and molesters? Why has it seemed to attract so many gay men who are psychologically disturbed or sick when it comes to their sexual orientation?

I find the answer pretty straightforward.

The church teaches first of all that all gay men are “objectively disordered”: deeply sick in their deepest soul and longing for love and intimacy. A young Catholic who finds out he’s gay therefore simultaneously finds out that his church regards him as sick and inherently evil, for something he doesn’t experience as a choice. That’s a distorting and deeply, deeply damaging psychic wound. Young Catholic gay boys, tormented by this seemingly ineradicable sinfulness, often seek religious authority as a way to cope with the despair and loneliness their sexual orientation can create. (Trust me on this; it was my life). So this self-loathing kid both abstracts himself from sexual relationships with peers, idolizes those “normal” peers he sees as he reaches post-pubescence, and is simultaneously terrified by these desires and so seeks both solace and cover for not getting married by entering the priesthood.

None of this is conceivable without the shame and distortion of the closet, or the church’s hideously misinformed and distorted view of homosexual orientation. And look at the age at which you are most likely to enter total sexual panic and arrest: exactly the age of the young teens these priests remain attracted to and abuse.

That’s the age when the shame deepens into despair; that's when sexuality is arrested; that’s where the psyche gets stunted. In some ways, I suspect, these molesters feel as if they are playing with equals – because emotionally they remain in the early teens. I’m not excusing this in any way; just trying to understand how such evil can be committed.

Ask yourself: how many openly gay and adjusted priests have been found to have abused minors? Or ask yourself another question: if straight men were forbidden to marry women, had their sexual and emotional development truncated at the age of 13, and were forced into institutions where they were treated by teenage girls as gods, an given untrammeled private access to them, how much sexual abuse do you think would occur there? Please. This is not that hard to understand.

I think it’s compounded by the shame gay bishops feel about their own sexual orientation. They, like Bill Donohue, secretly associate their homosexuality with dysfunction, disorder, chaos, evil. So when they come across a fellow priest found to have molested teenage boys or children, they associate it with homosexuality – not pederasty – associate themselves with it, and try to cover it up – partly because they want to protect the church (which is their sole refuge) and partly because they want to protect those they wrongly associate with themselves. My own view is that Ratzinger fits almost perfectly into this paradigm, just as Weakland did. Which means there will be no change until this generation dies off. If Ratzinger were to face the truth on this, his world would collapse. He is not giving up on denial yet. He is a prime example of the walking wounded. Crippled, in fact, in the sole area he cannot be crippled: moral authority.

I don’t believe, in other words, that you can tackle this problem without seeing it as a symptom of a much deeper failure of the church to come to terms with sexuality, sexual orientation and the warping, psychologically distorting impact of compulsory celibacy in the priesthood. If women and married men were allowed to be priests, if homosexuality were regarded in Catholic theology as a healthy and rare difference rather than as a shameful disorder, this atmosphere would end, and these crimes would for the most part disappear and the cloying, closeted power-structure which enabled them to go unpunished for so long would finally crumble. And the church could grow again.

Through the truth, not around it. But it’s exactly that truth that this pontiff and his enablers refuse to acknowledge. It would kill them.


* The statistics Donohue cites are from the John Jay Study. For an excellent analysis of how he misrepresents what this study actually says in full about homosexuality and the clergy abuse crisis, see William D. Lindsey’s post at Bilgrimage, “John Jay: No Correlation Between Sexual Orientation and Catholic Clerical Abuse.”


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Game Over
• Keeping All the Queens Under One Roof
• Let the (Blame) Games Begin
• An Offering of Ashes
• Remembering the Real Victims . . .
• The Roman Catholic Pyramid is Crumbling
• What Is It That Ails You?

Resurrection: Beyond Words, Dogmas, and All Possible Theological Formulations

Continuing with The Wild Reed’s special Holy Week 2010 series, I share today, Easter Sunday, a sixth excerpt from Andrew Harvey’s 1998 book, Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ.

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It was as the “Son of Man” [and not as some omniscient divine “savior” figure] . . . that Jesus undertook the journey that opened onto the splendor of resurrection. Like any other divine human being who wants to become one with the Kingdom beyond time and invoke its transfiguring power into the heart of reality and so into the heart of every thought, action, belief, and every cell of living matter, Jesus had to trust in the darkness, surrender to death after death, risk everything and suffer everything again and again.

Knowing this – and daring to face this – is what makes Jesus’ achievement devastating to all of our comfortable sense of human “fallibility” and “limits”; if Jesus is a divine human being like ourselves, what is to stop us from joining him in the undying but our cowardice, laziness, incapacity for surrendering, and unbelief? And with Jesus alive in every atom of the universe in eternal light and one with the highest aspiration of every soul and one with the divine now forever – but also turned toward us always as supreme friend, brother, lover, most generous, humble, and least authoritarian guide – what excuse do we have not to take our journey also through Gethsemane and Golgotha to the body ablaze with light outside the empty tomb?

It must be clear by now that I accept the resurrection as a mystical fact; this is where I part company from many of the modern historical scholars whose work I have learned so much from and whose scholarship I admire. The deepest learning and the wisest mind can never understand the mystery of the resurrection; it cannot, in fact, be “understood,” only known and experienced, beyond words, dogmas, all possible theological formulations, by the humbled and mystically awoken heart and through direct divine grace. Until all Christians dare to accept this, there will be endless empty tragicomic “discussion” and “argument.” But accepting this means accepting the entire mystical dimension of Christ’s life, teaching, and death and taking up his undying challenge to us all to realize in more and more daring and radical ways our divine identity.

Until we have begun to live directly and taste and inwardly experience our divine identity, the resurrected Cosmic Christ cannot be known; only by daring to try and “Christ” ourselves can the universal Christ be discovered inside and around us.

– Andrew Harvey
Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ
Pp 84-85

NEXT: The Cosmic Christ: Brother, Lover, Friend, Divine and Gentle Guide


For previous installments of this series, see
Jesus: Path-blazer of Radical Transformation
The Essential Christ
One Symbolic Iconoclastic Act
One Overwhelming Fire of Love
The Most Dangerous Kind of Rebel

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Passion of Christ (Part 11): Jesus Appears to Mary / “You Will See Him”
The Passion of Christ (Part 12): Jesus Appears to His Friends / Not Metaphor, Not Guilty Revision . . . But Something Else
Jesus Lives!
The Triumph of Love: An Easter Reflection
Light of Christ (Easter 2008)
He is Risen! (Easter 2007)
Easter Reflections
A Girl Named Sara: “A Person of the Resurrection”

Remembering the Real Victims . . .

. . . in the Roman Catholic clergy abuse crisis.

The Catholic hierarchy has engaged in and still engages in widely-documented, self-serving and on-going cover ups of devastating clergy sex crimes. That's why church records are being disclosed, predator priests are being exposed, and Catholic officials feel besieged.

- Excerpt from a SNAP Media Release
April 2, 2010

Good Friday reminds us that Jesus went to his crucifixion freely and surrendered his life for something greater, which came on Easter Sunday. This profound image may help the Catholic Church meditate on what it is invited to do. But that means that something has to die.

What needs to die is a clerical culture that fostered power, privilege and secrecy. An attitude that placed a priest's reputation above a child's welfare. A mindset in which investigations of dissident theologians and American Catholic sisters were more swiftly prosecuted than investigations of abusive priests. What needs to die is a certain pride. All this needs to be surrendered freely.

- James Martin, S.J.
A Priest Prays For The Church's Rebirth
National Public Radio
April 2, 2010

Recommended Online Articles and Commentaries:
Sacrilege? - Lisa Fullam (dotCommonweal, April 1, 2010).
Priest's Remarks Compare Abuse Uproar to Persecution of Jews - Daniel J. Wakin and Rachel Donadio (New York Times, April 2, 2010).
Child-Raping Priests and Their Protectors = The New Jews - Evan Hurst (TruthWinsOut.org, April 2, 2010).
Victims, Jewish Groups Slam 'Shameful' Remarks at Vatican - AFP (April 2, 2010).
John Jay Study: No Correlation Between Sexual Orientation and Catholic Clerical Abuse - William D. Lindsey (Bilgrimage, April 3, 2010).
This 'Blame the Gays' Defense of the Vatican Basically Makes No Sense at All - Jason Linkins (The Huffington Post, April 3, 2010).
It's Not About the Media: Blaming the Messenger in the Sex Abuse Crisis - James Martin, S.J. (The Huffington Post, April 1, 2010).
An Unholy Holy Week - Anne Eggebroten (Religion Dispatches, March 30, 2010).
What Did the Pope Know? - ABC News (April 1, 2010).
The Inquisitor Pope As the Agent of Apostasy - Frank Cocozzelli (The Open Tabernacle, April 3, 2010).
Prosecute the Pope - Geoffrey Robertson (The Daily Beast, April 1, 2010).
The Year of the Abusive Priest - Anthea Butler (Religious Dispatches, March 30, 2010).
The Absolute Wrong Response to Sex Abuse - Bryan Cones (U.S. Catholic, March 29, 2010).
New Criticism of Pope Further Clouds Easter Week - Francoise Kadri (AFP, April 3, 2010).
Vatican Waited Years to Defrock Arizona Priest - Matt Sedensky (Associated Press, April 3, 2010).
Loyal Roman Soldiers Upholding the Power of the Empire - Colleen Kochivar-Baker (Enlightened Catholicism, April 2, 2010).
Pray For Us - James Martin, S.J. (America, March 31, 2010).
Threatened with Resurrection: The Testimony of Survivors, Reformation, and the Future of Catholicism - William D. Lindsey (The Open Tabernacle, April 4, 2010).

Recommended Website:
SNAP - The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

The Most Dangerous Kind of Rebel

Continuing with The Wild Reed’s special Holy Week 2010 series, I share today, Good Friday, a fifth excerpt from Andrew Harvey’s 1998 book, Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ. It’s accompanied by the artwork of Michael D. O’Brien.

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Why did the Roman authorities perceive Jesus as a threat when he preached and lived nonviolence? Unlike the Zealots (who were the main Jewish resistance party) and the many rebel bandit bands that roamed Judaea, Jesus explicitly and repeatedly urged his followers not to fight Rome but to embrace all beings in the spirit of God. Yet he was crucified as a political rebel.

The deepest answer is that taken together, Jesus’ teachings challenged the entire patriarchal order on which Roman power was based. To a world obsessed by power, Jesus offered a vision of the radiance of the powerlessness and powerful vulnerability of love; to a culture riddled with authoritarianism of every kind, he gave a vision of the holiness of inner and outer poverty and a critique of the vanity and horror of all forms of worldly achievement; to a society arranged at every level into different hierarchies, he presented in his own life, being, and daily practice a vision of a radical and all embracing egalitarianism designed to end forever those dogmas and institutions that keep women enslaved, races separated from each other, the poor starving, and the rich rotting in prisons of selfish luxury. His extraordinary spiritual gifts and healing powers clearly convinced people of the truth of his vision; whether he preached nonviolence was not as important to the Roman authorities as the fact that Jesus commanded respect and love wholly independent of them, had a large following, was preaching an alternative world that reversed the terms of their imperium in every way, and was declared by some of his followers on many occasions to be a “king” with his own “Kingdom.”

Everything Jesus said or did was designed to bring into being the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom that had nothing whatever to do with the patriarchal system of power on which the Romans based their empire – nothing to do with its fierce rule of law, its vaunting of military power, its cynical disregard for all religious parties and institutions, or its myth of the divinity of the Roman emperor. All the ideals that Jesus stressed – of humility, tenderness for life, embrace of the outcast and the abandoned – ran counter to the competitive and militaristic passions that fueled the growth of the Roman empire. At that moment when one of patriarchy’s most powerful systems was to begin its long grim triumph, Jesus revealed and enacted a way of subverting all of its beliefs, practices, goals, and “truths.” And he was killed for it.



. . Jesus was the most dangerous kind of rebel – a rebel who had seen the Kingdom and knew it was the only reality. He was the most dangerous kind of rebel because he not merely talked about the Kingdom; he lived and manifested its splendor in the beauty of his presence, in the clarity and inner coherence of his teaching, in his fearlessness in the face of opposition. He was the most dangerous kind of rebel because he could not be swerved from his purpose by anything, and he could not be bought by any lure, not even that of being a “master” or a “god”: his integrity was terrible and final.

Jesus was the most dangerous kind of rebel, too, because the vision that guided and inspired him through everything flamed from a direct mystical knowledge of God and would give him the courage to die, if necessary, for what he believed; not even torture, humiliation, and death would destroy his spirit.

– Andrew Harvey
Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ
Pp 76-78

NEXT: Resurrection: Beyond Words, Dogmas, and All Theological Formulations


For previous installments of this series, see
Jesus: Path-blazer of Radical Transformation
The Essential Christ
One Symbolic Iconoclastic Act
One Overwhelming Fire of Love

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Passion of Christ (Part 6): Jesus Before the Soldiers / Jesus, Our Tortured Brother Today
The Passion of Christ (Part 7): Jesus Goes to His Execution / The Economic Way of the Cross
The Passion of Christ (Part 8): Jesus is Nailed to the Cross / Heart of Darkness
The Passion of Christ (Part 9): Jesus Dies / Jesus' Passion
The Passion of Christ (Part 10): Jesus Among the Dead / No Splendor, No Glory
Why Jesus is My Man

Recommended Off-site Links:
Andrew Harvey’s Official Website
Tasting the Darkness of Good Friday - Ron Rolheiser (April 20, 2005).
Was Jesus Raped? - Michael Iafrate (The Jesus Manifesto, April 2, 2010).

Artwork: Michael D. O’Brien.

Quote of the Day

Can we trust this current Vatican, even under Benedict, to really reform and follow through on cleaning up the Church - on some sort of permanent basis? Well, no, we can’t, because Ratzinger himself bailed on his desire to investigate Austrian Cardinal Groer and Fr. Maciel and the Legion of Christ. We have absolutely no certainty that the next pope won’t be as obstructionist as the last pope and that all the underling “Cardinal Ratzingers” won’t trade in their personal disgust, shame, and integrity in favor of closing ranks and obeying. For the 'good’ of the Church.

Catholics cannot afford to be diverted by excuses which leave an ultimately unaccountable clerical culture in charge of the whole Catholic show. All that will accomplish is to insure that abuse of the faithful continues, that Catholics will be held hostage not to the principles of love that Jesus asked of us, but to the demands of a highly compartmentalized and protected class of men.

Men, who when it comes to the exercise of secular and clerical power, do not get Good Friday. The day their professed Savior rejected all forms of power in favor of the love and forgiveness He preached. The day He hung ignominiously and powerless from a secular Roman cross. An execution accomplished with the collusion of clerical power.

It angers me no end that any bishop would dare to imply the Church hangs on that cross because of publicity they generated themselves. No, their victims hang on that cross while they sit at the foot and haggle like the Roman soldiers they are over what’s left of the spoils.

- Colleen Kochivar-Baker
“Loyal Roman Soldiers Upholding the Power of the Empire”
Enlightened Catholicism
April 2, 2010

"I've Been Changed,Yes, Really Changed . . ."

A musical interlude this evening at The Wild Reed with Yvonne Elliman's beautiful rendition of "I Don't Know How to Love Him" (from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar). She's playing the role of Mary Magdalene.





See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Revisiting a Groovy Jesus (and a Dysfunctional Theology)
Mary of Magdala
Apostle to the Apostles
Thoughts on The Da Vinci Code
Why Jesus is My Man

Recommended Off-site Links:
The Woman from Magdala - James Martin, S.J. (America Magazine, July 22, 2009).
Who Framed Mary Magdalene? - Heidi Schlumpf (U.S. Catholic).

One Overwhelming Fire of Love

Continuing with The Wild Reed’s special Holy Week 2010 series, I share today a fourth excerpt from Andrew Harvey’s 1998 book, Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ.

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I believe Jesus willingly and consciously precipitated the events that led to his capture, trial, and crucifixion. Whether or not he knew, in any human sense of “knowing,” that his descent into the ultimate depths of humiliation and torment would utterly remake his being and the whole future of humanity we can never be sure; the account of the Gospels of the crucifixion and resurrection were written after the fact, and with certain clarities projected backwards.

I believe that Jesus did not know; that he risked his entire being in a final terrible adventure whose end was not certain. This better explains, I believe, his fear and fragility in the Garden of Gethsemane and the moments of doubt on the cross. He did not “know”; he loved and trusted and surrendered and went on loving and trusting and surrendering, more and more deeply, more and more abandonedly, as the storms of suffering that buffeted him became more and more atrocious. Everything that he discovered and lived, every truth that he had taught, every passion for a new world that had awoken in him now had to coalesce into one overwhelming fire of love, which would rest death itself and beat against the doors of that law of nature that had up to then kept heaven and earth separate, the living and the dead in their different rooms.

In his life, Jesus had lived out the truths of the Kingdom on earth with extreme integrity; now in his dying he would subject that integrity to an even greater test – the test of annihilation. Had Jesus known that he would be reborn on the third day, some of the final work of that annihilation could not be done; the dying that led to the resurrection had to be a complete annihilation of everything, even of his belief in himself, in his mission, in his unfailing and infallible connection to God, perhaps even of his belief in the deathlessness of divine love itself. All certainties and forms of knowing and awareness had to be utterly annihilated in God for the new to be possible, the utterly unprecedented to be born.

No one, not even the greatest mystic, can know beforehand what such a stripping inevitably entails; its agony is too extreme for the mind to imagine and its torture reaches more deeply and finally into the ultimate recesses of being than any previous form of suffering. All that anyone who has come to this final place can do is what Jesus did – give up everything to the mystery of God, surrender totally. Such a surrender is a passing through zone after zone of loss, humiliation, and crushing, savage suffering; one of the many ways in which Jesus moves us to depths we hardly knew we possessed before we began to know him is that for him, too, such a surrender was dreadful and cost everything and had to be done in ever-more demanding stages of terror and weeping and deeper and deeper prayer. But a whole lifetime of the most passionate love and sacrifice had prepared Jesus to take this journey on behalf of the whole of humanity.

In his life and teaching, Jesus had shown the inner and outer truths of the Kingdom; he had been a living son of its fire. Now in his dying, he would bring the realization of the Kingdom on earth even closer by sacrificing everything for it in extreme and final trust, abandon, and love. Through such an extreme gift of himself he was not “simply” redeeming the sins of humanity; that is too small a description of so vast an enterprise. He wasn’t “just” redeeming the past of humanity but revealing the limitlessness of the powers entrusted by God to the human soul, and so revealing a wholly new possible future. By suffering horrible evil without hatred and in the spirit of forgiveness of the Kingdom, he put into ultimate practice his teaching of loving non-violence on the deepest possible level, and showed that such love could birth a soul-force capable of carrying him – and anyone who truly believed and trusted it – not only through death but into the dimension of the deathless, where the Kingdom’s dream of fusing matter and spirit in one glory permanently would be realized, as it was realized in him “on the third day.”

– Andrew Harvey
Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ
Pp 82-84

NEXT: The Most Dangerous Kind of Rebel


For previous installments of this series, see
Jesus: Path-blazer of Radical Transformation
The Essential Christ
One Symbolic Iconoclastic Act

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Why Jesus is My Man
An Enlightened Exploration of Integrity and Obedience
Revisiting a Groovy Jesus (and a Dysfunctional Theology)
What We Can Learn from the Story of the Magi

Recommended Off-site Link:
Andrew Harvey’s Official Website

Quote of the Day

We should remind [Catholic League President Bill] Donohue that there is no child sexual abuse crisis in gay community centers, neighborhoods, churches or social organizations. This nightmare [of the Roman Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal] has to do with Catholic pedophile priests and those who served as their enablers. The Catholic League thinks it is mounting a defense, but it is only exacerbating the pain felt by the defenseless who were taken advantage of by authority figures in the church.

– Wayne Besen
TruthWinsOut.org Appalled by Catholic League’s
Misleading Ad Smearing Gays
March 30, 2010

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Report: Homosexuality No Factor in Abusive Priests
Abuse Survivor Says Scapegoating Homosexuality for Clergy Sexual Abuse is "Ill-informed, Ignorant, Corrupt and Dishonest"
Vatican Stance on Gay Priests Signals Urgent Need for Renewal and Reform
Weakland, the Clergy Sex Abuse Scandal, and Homophobia
The Pope's "Scandalous" Stance on Homosexuality
Homosexuality and the Priesthood