The Transcendental: The Church Project

Bread

February 17, 2024

I haven't really been studying religion that much to find things that could be improved or just problematic things with the teaching or preaching part, but that's not to say that I can't think of any because I did get opportunities to observe and I did find things that may well be the reason why there are people who'd rather turn to spirituality or other methods of developing or deepening their relationship with the divine/God. Like yesterday, there was this reverend at school, and she was preaching about family structure and parenting, and I was like agreeing to her on some points, particularly about how love of money destroys families and how husbands and wives are actually equals. I was actually like: Oh, I was just writing about that, you know, about the role of men and women and how it's really got nothing to do with gender. But then she started to go into the subject of premarital sex and living under the same roof premaritally, and I was like: Here we go with the archaics. Here we go with the black and whites of it. And that's three things right away, you know. There's rigidity, insensitivity, and this overbearing kind of morality. There's no tempering there even. It's just suggesting that everything premarital is morally wrong. There was no talk about the amount of marriages dissolved and dissolving by way of annulment or divorce and how there's nothing morally wrong about premarital sex and co-habitation between consenting adults, but if you're looking for something morally wrong, where there's marrying for money or to avoid public shaming or just in general, forced marriages between people who don't wanna marry each other. If you're looking for something morally wrong about sex, well, you already know what that is - and that is when there is lack of consent, where people could go to jail.

I think for the most part, every preacher would agree, when teaching about morality, the focus should be on improving the quality of life. You can probably warn young men and women about the risks of premarital sex and co-habitation. You can tell women, they could get pregnant, and you tell the men, they'd become fathers. You know: Women, when you get pregnant while you're still in school, then you would have to juggle pregnancy and studies. When you give birth, you're gonna have to juggle raising a child and studying. You think you're not ready for that? Don't have sex, maybe. Men, when you get a woman pregnant while you're still in school, you would have to step into the role of a man who fathered a child and juggle that with your studies. Do you have money for prenatal checkups and vitamins? You can tell them that. That's gonna make you sound like captain obvious, but that's what telling people about the risks and the responsibilities that might come from it. But that's just because your focus is on things working out and not on virginity, be it a man's or a woman's, and because you're associating it with purity and interestingly, owing it to the blessed Virgin Mary's immaculate conception. Mary's purity is actually not owing to her being a virgin, or is it? When you focus your preaching on a weird and funny concept of purity, your speech would have you sinning 'cause you're gonna be speaking the language of shame. You would be sinning with your words. Your language will be rigid and insensitive. And this I find is something that rather turns people away from preachers, and personally, if a preacher's speaking the language of shame, you won't be wrong looking elsewhere. Because shame is something that actually results in community degeneration. Nothing good comes out of it. Not even in the realm of penance or making the choice to change. Shame is something that a community or a space should be eliminating if it wants to grow and be functional.

What should be in there instead of shame? Reason. Logic. Truth. Where there is shame, people are proud of being wrong. There is a collective delusion about something. 'Cause shame thrives in darkness - where understanding can't be found because people don't think and they're not open to reason, because then light isn't allowed to enter.

Darkness has a purpose, but it is not to grow and water things like that. In darkness, you allow light to enter. And now I am inviting you to ask yourself what good shame does to a community. 'Cause I have seen people thinking of shame as a tool for penance and rehabilitation. And that's wrong. It is not.

Religion, I think, and its preachers and spiritual teachers share the same desire and that is to rehabilitate people. On any given day, a man goes to church or a dwelling that to him is the house of God and I suppose for two reasons. One is to give thanks. And two is because he desires to be a better man, to be rehabilitated in some way, not to please God but to improve the quality of his life. The man who gives thanks could be a man who got healing after seeing his doctor or a man who sees that seeing this teacher improved the quality of his life. And the other one could be someone who's just begun investing in healing. But if you're going to church or to the house of God, and just because you're afraid to go to hell, that's kind of missing out on the opportunity, that's like being offered bread in church and not taking the bread. Hell is poor quality of life. Hell is the result of ignoring what gives you hell, it's the festering issues that's keeping you from having a good life. Hell may well be the result of spiritual poverty. So, either you go to church or you commune with the divine in a personal space you got, you take the bread. The bread is of course not a piece of bread, but I call it bread because - well, we could also call it soup - but really, it is just something that nourishes. Take the bread, it is spiritual nourishment. But if you want this to be more specific, bread is what you use to get rid of the things in your life that's a source of suffering. And actually, this is what they call in spirituality, 'purification'. This is not to make a saint out of you, but it's more to do with healing, really, by way of clearing out things that don't serve you and give you a good life. And this purification process is then gonna deepen your connection with the divine, because it's gonna make you feel just loved by the divine.

'Cause let's be upfront about it. There are people who just don't feel the presence of the divine in their lives because suffering gets in the way. People will tell you it's just being ungrateful and that the key is gratitude, but that's barely scratching the surface. There are things that separate people from the divine, and when there's this disconnection or separation, it's just gonna be difficult to have feelings of gratitude. So, the person is then to first address the wounds or the source of suffering and work with a religious or spiritual preacher or guide with healing them, and then it's just gonna flow. It is in healing that the connection with the divine gets restored. 'Cause suffering could create this thing that happens to telephone lines where you just can't communicate well and because the line's just cutting out and it could be that there's just nothing, and you just keep saying: Hello, God, are you there? 'You there? Hello? It's like this interference. But healing is how you repair the line of communication, that's what restores the connection. The divine will assist you in repairing the line. But you got to take the bread. You got to take the divine word. That's how you connect.