{"id":4,"date":"2013-06-06T16:28:24","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T23:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/?page_id=4"},"modified":"2020-09-22T12:16:47","modified_gmt":"2020-09-22T19:16:47","slug":"mischievous-spirit-and-theology-queer-and-green","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/","title":{"rendered":"Mischievous Spirit and Theology: Queer and Green"},"content":{"rendered":"

I chose Mischievous Spirit and Theology as the name of this website. It represents two primary passions in life: \u00a0Spiritualities and Theologies, Queer and Green. But they do not exhaust my other interests from Gender Issues to Comparative Religion(s), Systematic and Contextual Theologies, Interfaith Dialogue and Interfaith Spiritualities,\u00a0 Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Engaged Buddhisms, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Outsider Social Movements, , Ecological Spiritualities and Theologies, and Lady Gaga.<\/p>\n

“Friends, There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled…Friends, don’t be discouraged. Compassion comes after trouble. Don’t put on any dress but Love.\u00a0 Don’t cover yourself with any garment but Love… Be drunk with Love, for Love is all that exists.” ~ Rumi<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We live in an age where the Holy Spirit is tearing down walls between peoples and communities of faith and struggling to preserve life on the Earth and generating greater compassion and love among us.Do we dare to listen to the Holy Spirit, the mischief-maker. She will leads in an unconventional journey of compassion, building bridges and tearing down walls, teaching us to listen to her invitation to inclusive and open vision of life.<\/p>\n

Queer:<\/b><\/p>\n

My spirituality and theology is Queer.\u00a0 Queer, for myself, is a transgressive approach to spiritualities and theologies that have become hardened in their dogmatisms and moralisms.\u00a0 Queer is a verb. As an active verb, it means \u201cto interfere with or spoil.\u201d If a particular religion, community of faith, ritual, or doctrine excludes\u2014such as the exclusion of LGBTQI folks\u2014then \u201cto queer\u201d that exclusion is to spoil or interfere with its exclusions. In other words, it is spoiled to become more inclusive.\u00a0 Queer is turn \u201cinside out, upside down\u201d that which is culturally heteronormative.\u00a0 For example, we find those bringing Jesus before Pilate, charging: \u201cWe have found this man perverting our nation\u2026\u201d (Luke 23:2)\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 practice of the reign of God had a topsy-turvy quality that challenged the oppressive exclusions of patriarchal culture and religion.\u00a0 Queering simply overturns those exclusions to make it more inclusive for people.<\/p>\n

My fellow queer sojourners use some very apt descriptions from other personal contexts. Marcella Althaus-Reid speaks of making theology \u201cindecent\u201d since decent theology excludes the marginalized and indecent people.\u00a0\u00a0 Justin Tanis, a trans-gay man, poetically understands queer as to live in twilight space at dusk between day and night or the dawn between night and day.\u00a0 Gender fluidity has been consigned to those liminal spaces in our society. They create queer ambiguity. Finally, Patrick S. Cheng perceives queer as the erasing of defined or essentialist binary categories of gender, sexuality, and race.\u00a0\u00a0 His rainbow theology celebrates divergences and differences in a positive fashion.\u00a0 I find Patrick\u2019s notion of queer, of erasing binaries very similar to the Buddhist experience of non-duality.<\/p>\n

\u201cQueer Theology does theology with impunity. Borders of thinking are crossed. Borders of prayer are crossed. Body borders. God may cross God\u2019s own borders too.\u201d ~ Marcella Althaus-Reid (One of my patron Saints)<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus, queer is a strategic practice of spirituality and theology that aims for radical inclusive love\u2014God\u2019s gracious tearing down of walls and making love accessible and available to all. I am drawn by queer triune God, the divine community\u2019s inclusive and promiscuous love. I am on a journey to greater inclusiveness.<\/p>\n

I make available my first book\u2014Jesus ACTED UP: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto<\/em>\u2014to you for a donation to an AIDS Hospice in Tijuana or Environmental Interfaith Movement, Interfaith Power and Life, or to the Environmental Justice Ministry of the United Church of Christ.<\/a><\/p>\n

For those struggling with the Bible and Homosexuality: See my youtubes on Homosexuality and the Bible or read \u201cThe Practice of Safe Texts<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

At YouTube:
\nTalk 1: Leviticus \u2013 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yagCSgWsmp4<\/a>
\nTalk 2: Sodom and Gomorrah and Judges 19 \u2013 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DzTh1gjzCCU<\/a>
\nTalk 3: Paul \u2013Part 1 \u2013 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ItEo5wPRDDU<\/a>
\nTalk 3: Paul \u2013Part 2 \u2013 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rEp6gLxYwhY<\/a>
\nTalk 4: Jesus and Homoeroticism \u2013 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ezxcPqmUoFo<\/a><\/p>\n

A conversation with Dr. Kwok Pui Lan for her Christology Class at Candler School of Theology (Emory University). It is based on Chapter ‘Homodevotion to Jesus” in Queering Christ.<\/em><\/p>\n

https:\/\/emory.zoom.us\/rec\/play\/uJcudr-oq2o3Ht2dtASDC6MqW9Tse_6shiIf__tZy02yUXkLNgX1NbMaY7M_9j_dLjp0yhkI-CgO9cwr?continueMode=true&_x_zm_rtaid=8bWcxXajRy6KDanidFphOQ.1585759958927.ff9e655f802db17e88e4f02eb7422c51&_x_zm_rhtaid=95<\/p>\n

\"Queer<\/a><\/p>\n

Grace is Green: <\/b><\/p>\n

The earth with all its life has been subjected to reckless human exploitation and domination, impacting the climate processes and creating global warming.\u00a0 Matthew Fox wrote more than two decades, \u201c\u00a0 \u2026the killing of Mother Earth in our time is the number one ethical, spiritual, and human issue of our planet.\u201d\u00a0 So many governments and religious communities fail to take serious climate change and its impact upon the Earth and all life. Our human original sin is human exceptionalism above the Earth and other life. Such hubris has led to the situation that all of us are facing now and more intensely this century as the polar ice caps and Greenland glaciers melt.\u00a0 Watch: Earth 2100 on YouTube (Part 1 of nine) (http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bjmWivCTcv<\/a>).<\/p>\n

My passion for the Earth came with the recognition of queer Christian inclusion and the radical inclusive mission of Jesus, and with the congregation I served, we made the Earth a member of our church. Hildegard of Bingen \u2013 a 12th<\/sup>century Abbess, mystic and prophetic visionary \u2014 writes about the green power of God, Christ, and the Spirit.\u00a0 She uses the\u00a0the word viriditas<\/em>, a Latin compound of green and truth, to speak about the greening power or grace of God. It is the divine greening power or fecundity that animates creation from the beginning, planting, nourishing, and flourishing. Hildegard comprehends Jesus as greenness incarnate and the Holy Spirit as the sustaining and enlivening green presence within creation. God\u2019s grace is green and sustains the Earth and all\u00a0life.<\/span><\/p>\n

The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. The devastation of the planet can be seen as a direct consequence of the loss of this capacity for human presence to and reciprocity with the nonhuman world. This reached its most decisive moment in the seventeenth-century proposal of Ren\u00e9 Descartes that the universe is composed simply of \u201cmind and mechanism.\u201d In this single stroke, he devitalized the planet and all its living creatures, with the exception of the human.\u00a0 \u00a0Thomas Berry<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The human impact on the Earth and climate changes provides a challenge to humanity to reconnect with the Earth and envision ourselves as part of the biotic community of life as modeled by Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Albert Schweitzer, Rachel Carson, Leonardo Boff, Sallie McFague, Thomas Berry, Greta Thunberg, and many indigenous peoples, green activists, theologians, Earth-loving peoples of faith.<\/p>\n

\"God<\/a><\/p>\n

Read an excerpt from God is Green: Introduction<\/a><\/p>\n

Watch my youtube talks on Environmental Justice and Falling in Love with God\u2019s Earth<\/a>.\u00a0 Read my articles and sermons on ecology and Christianity.<\/p>\n

All Christian theologies need to green itself and foster a compassionate praxis of care and love for all life. We need to fight for life\u2014ALL LIFE and the EARTH HERSELF!<\/p>\n

Click here to read my essay, Queer and Green Compassionate Care and Co-living with the earth.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I chose Mischievous Spirit and Theology as the name of this website. It represents two primary passions in life: \u00a0Spiritualities and Theologies, Queer and Green. But they do not exhaust my other interests from Gender Issues to Comparative Religion(s), Systematic and Contextual Theologies, Interfaith Dialogue and Interfaith Spiritualities,\u00a0 Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Engaged Buddhisms, Science Fiction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P3Cgaj-4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":701,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions\/701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}