With Opened Hearts, Opened Hands

                                Dorothy Day, Saint of the Gutter Beautiful

                                          It's Time To Dissent

Dorothy Day is oftentimes held up as a "model" of what it means to be a "good Catholic": traditional, prayerful, and alive with an activated compassion. She is now, as often as not, also referred to as a "saint", however much she protested at the mere thought of someday being canonized. In the Catholic Worker community, opinions as to Dorothy's possible canonization vary (as one would expect)...

Having "progressed" through thirty years of a Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen, a convert's enthusiastic faith, and any number of broken hearts, my outlook now mirrors my "in-look"... I have settled into being an "outsider", a "renegade", if you will... and no doubt not a few would consider me a heretic. Okay. Well, no. Okay! is much more like it!

Perhaps there is no spiritual evolution in "heaven". Perhaps Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, St. Francis, Rumi, Abraham Heschel, and all the rest are, and will forever remain, exactly as they were while living / working / praying / and thinking while alive on this plane of existence... But, perhaps too, there is a continuing opening into the New Creation...

As for me, I dissent to theologies -- however they be marketed as "traditional" -- that marginalize the female gender, that justify institutions and practices of "power over" rather than "power under", and that effectively fail to rEvolutionize the mass of faithful. The systems of religion continue to allow for violence as a solution to problems. A "plunderful" capitalism rules the world. And "Trumpism" is allowed to flourish in all its putrid corruption and body of lies: endorsed and supported by Christians. I dissent from the comfortable Christianity / Catholicism that refuses to finally acknowledge that much of what is in the Bible is a load of hoo-ey: for example, see Numbers 31: 9, 17, 18. I dissent from a Christianity / Catholicism that allows for the demonization of sacred sex and pleasure. I dissent from a Christianity / Catholicism that has institutionalized trauma, domination, and death...  

Because I dissent, I stand for a rEvolutionary renewal of what it means to accept / or believe / or simply admit to the possibility of a Divine -- Quantum -- Consciousness, a Divine Beloved still Sourcing and Creating and Sustaining and Loving... I actually believe that it is this stance which is traditional and the excuses and justifications are what is not. Reading both the mystics of old -- and more importantly -- the mystics of today is essential. People like Riane Eisler, Matthew Fox, Andrew Harvey, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, John Philip Newell, and James Hughes Reho point the way to a rEvolutionary renewal: a re-birthing of Yeshua the Poet of Nazareth for the 21st century and forward... The Christian / Catholic life is meant to be an inward journey that compels an opening of the heart into a Radiant Transformation and an opening of our hands into a Radical Compassion... opened hearts and opened hands with which to embrace all of creation and the entire human family in the blessed delight of loving...   

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