The L Word

I feel compelled to talk about the L word.

No, not the popular cable series about lesbians and love (which I really must Netflix someday). No, not linguini or lassitude or luminous or lice – although any of those topics might make good blog fodder some day. (I have had my run-ins with lice).

I’m talking about the word Lord.

I've noticed this jump-on-the-bandwagon-meme thing happening on Facebook lately – “Jesus is Lord! If you agree please click ‘like.’” When you do so, it shows up in your list of “likes” and as an announcement on your page so that your friends can see it.

I am a Christian practicing within the Catholic tradition, a follower of Christ – though perhaps a quirky “liminal” one – and I’m pretty certain that all of my friends in Cyberia and in meet-space know this. But -- though I appreciate the sentiments of my FB friends who have done so -- I am not clicking on “Jesus is Lord.”

Why?

Because my Facebook friends are a virtual interspiritual conglomeration. When I look at my list of friends, I see Buddhists, Jews, Agnostics, Atheists, Panentheists, Pagans, Yogis, Swamis, Shamans, Waking Downers, Self-Realizers, Bellydancers, Methodists, Metaphysicists, Mormons, Lutherans, Quakers, Ex-Catholics, Advaitans, Vegans, Humanists, Environmentalists, Episcopalians, Non-Denominationalists, Taoists, Sufis, Zen Meditators, Integralists, and variously shifting intersections and mixtures thereof. 

I have a great respect for this proliferation of spiritual paths, for the irrepressible magnanimity of the sacred and the secular. It fills me with awe to behold it, and to be held within it. Such a radiantly flowering Mystery it is! And within this wild Mystery, I journey and love and pray as a part of the body of Christ with no need or desire to proclaim my path as “Lord”  in the company of those born or beckoned into any other of the world’s wisdoms.

If you’ve ever attended a well-planned interreligious gathering, you probably know what it feels like to be quickened and deepened through a mutual multifaith sharing of questions and stories and silences. Every once in a blue moon, I get a chance to attend an interfaith contemplative service or meditative sit. My good friend Kathy C. and I attended a contemplative interfaith weekend at La Casa de Maria in Santa Barbara several years ago, an event sponsored by the Spiritual Paths Institute. Teachers and celebrants included Father Thomas Keating, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Kabir and Camille Helminski -- a Sufi couple, and Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi -- a Buddhist chaplain. The closing ceremony was a profound experience of alternating silences, chant, sharing, and prayer – at one point we were swept up in a choral round and vocal tapestry incorporating elements of all four traditions at once – a shimmering moment that left many of us in tears.

And now I’ll say the obvious: you never close such communal celebrations with the prayer, “through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.” Instead, you invoke the One Who Cannot Be Named, the Great Mystery, Source, Being, Not-One and Not-Two. You allow Whatever or Whomever you are referring to as God or Eternal or Presence to be much larger than any one culture’s or tradition’s experience of the All-in-all. And you recognize yet again – perhaps with a welcome rush of wonder and gratitude – that no single tradition holds the corner on truth.

In light of that recognition, I do not click “like” on the meme “Jesus is Lord.”

But – but !! – check out this different yet related insight I encountered while reading Joseph Prabhu’s article about “interreligious apostle” Raimon Panikkar, who, rest his soul, died just last month. In The Hidden Christ of the Hindus, Prabhu explains, Panikkar offered the notion that “Christ and his teaching are not … the monopoly or exclusive property of Christianity seen as a historical religion. Rather, Christ is the universal symbol of divine-human unity, the human face of God. Christianity approaches Christ in a particular and unique way, informed by its own history and spiritual evolution. But Christ vastly transcends Christianity. Panikkar calls the name ‘Christ’ the ‘Supername,’ in line with St. Paul's ‘name above every name’ (Phil 2:9), because it is a name that can and must assume other names, like Rama or Krishna or Ishvara.” Furthermore, as Panikkar once remarked, “To the third Christian millennium is reserved the task of overcoming a tribal Christology by a Christophany which allows Christians to see the work of Christ everywhere, without assuming that they have a better grasp or a monopoly of that Mystery, which has been revealed to them in a unique way." If more folks, (Christian or otherwise) voiced this kind of perspective on Christ or felt that the Christian tradition was not the Only Sole Ultimate Truth About All Things Spiritual, I might feel less touchy about public declarations of “Christ as Lord.”

Maybe.

Anyway – okay, there’s more -- I might just trip you out now! – I also want to talk about my sweet sweet love of the L word.

After I slowly emerged from my antireligious phase (for me between the ages of 15 and 35), I encountered an interesting conundrum: objections to the prayerful, in-church use of the word “Lord” (or any other “male” name for God) among some religious folks.

The feminist theologian Kathleen Fischer, for example, decries of the use of exclusively male terms to denote God, asserting that patriarchal images of the Divine can restrict women’s (and men’s) religious experiences. She is right to point out that confusing a particular symbol of God for the actuality of God is a form of idolatry –  and that when we (perhaps unwittingly) do this we “box God in,” squeeze the boundless Mystery into a temporal, human-made form, limiting our own potential for spiritual growth and transformation. I get that, and I agree.

Then, in church, I came across some religious progressives who fervently condemned the use of “Lord” as a word for the Divine. In their opinion, the L word implies that God is some kind of cruel feudal master whom we servile peon-subjects must obey – or else. Truly, I do understand the need to personally jettison the word “Lord” when it holds this kind of oppressive connotation. But for many African-American (and other!) Christians, “Lord” remains both a tender and reverent name for God and/or Jesus – it (ironically, perhaps!) has no “master-slave” overtones. My childhood experience (prior to my antireligious phase) attests to this. In the churches of my girlhood, I recall the Lord as a great lover of our oppressed ancestors, walking with and grieving in our sorrows, finding so many ways to tend to our wounds – and, perhaps most significantly, joyfully liberating and empowering us! In the homes of my friends, it often seemed that Lord was simply God’s first name, and thus a friendlier, informal term for God – tu rather than vous. Lord even became an affectionate nickname at times, akin to “Sweetie” or “Honey.” Common exclamations in my neighborhood included “Good Lord!” “Do, Lord!” and “Lordie Be!” While you could utter the word “God” in vain, such was not the case with the phrases like “Oh Lord,” because, apparently, once you were on a first-name basis, the Lord had a humungously understanding heart and a grand sense of humor. The Lord, then, was simultaneously protector and confidant,  liberator and nurturer, friend and path-walker, powerful and merciful, gentle fire and bold imprinter of the Word in our hearts, and – we must not forget-- sacred instigator of fish frys.*

What some folks see as oppressive language is experienced by other folks as liberating and empowering and consoling. So, yes: we should avoid turning symbols into idols, as Fischer suggests; yet also: we should not censor or suppress any particular image of or name for God that arises out of our lived experiences.

One of the changes that happened to me, when I tip-toed into meditation and prayer back in the 1990s, is that I overcame my allergy to words signifying the second-person of the Divine, words like “Lord,” “God,” “Thou,” and even “Father.” It didn’t happen all at once – it took time, and silence, and patience, and sitting with feelings of absurdity and ridiculousness – and grace, of course. But when I was able to open my heart to the great Other, to unashamed relationship with Spirit, the tenderness and intimacy with God that I had known as a girl resurfaced, and “Lord” once again became a name for Love, for this Mystery embracing us all.

At the same time, I know I live in a world where the phrase “Jesus is Lord” is not always an invitation to love and compassion. Sometimes it is a threat, a bludgeon, or a precursor to burning the sacred texts or buildings or bodies of our brothers and sisters. So, out of love and concern, I am careful about my use of the L word.

My ramblings here offer just one example of what it is to be a liminal Christian: living what seems to be a paradox in which one simultaneously avoids and embraces the L word. Sometimes it feels like I’m walking on a razor’s edge. But as the old(er) folks still say, the Lord loves fools and babies… and lazy lice-encounterers too, I suppose. I trust Her to catch me when I fall.



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