Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Everything Is Spiritual: Finding Your Way in a Turbulent World > Status Update

Life and death are in close proximity. To make you, millions of your father’s sperm died- millions of deaths, failure & unmet potential. All that death, right there at your beginning, woven in to your origin. We know we’re all going to die in the end, but death is also there in our beginning. Death is present in all of creation, every step of the way. The borders & boundaries are way more porous than we realize.

Spirit moves- the old (static) forms don’t work like they once did. The word “radical” has its Latin origin in “radix”, meaning ‘root’. The radical is not the person wandering off the path into deep weeds. The radical is the person who went back to the roots, the origin. Sometimes it’s the institutional tribe (orthodox ones) that lost its way, and the radical is rediscovering the true path.

We can sometimes exchange one rigid form, one fundamentalism out for another. Leaders, teachers, gurus, authority figures, systems, structures, institutions, codes, movements- they can serve helpful purposes at stages. They showed you the way, discerning with you (or FOR you). Until you grew & those forms became traps. Not necessarily because something was wrong w/them; It’s more about earlier v. later than rt/wrng

Forms work, until they can no longer contain the new thing happening inside us- the new expansion that doesn’t fit in the current form. The same form that can be new, exciting & liberating, can over time become limiting, stifling & conflicting. A form helps, until it doesn’t. The problem may not be with the form, but rather with looking to it to continue to give you what it can only give you for that stage/time.

We can sometimes pick up a belief that it’s our job to somehow get people from where they are, to where they should be. From one place of believing & acting to another place. When you wish someone were in some other place, and you see it as your job to help them get there, there’s a weight that comes with that. It’s draining. Behind this is the delusion that we can change people.

The revolutionary Truth at the heart of the Jesus story is that there is another way to create change besides aggression and violence. Jesus is executed for insisting that there are other ways to change the world: love, solidarity, generosity, compassion, praying for your enemies [and speaking truth to power]. He insists these other forces in the world are more enduring & powerful than revenge.

People fall again & again for the ancient seduction of empire. [Many American Christians] are deeply enmeshed in & actively propping up the very thing Jesus came to set people free from. Biblical authors eschewed grand empires/powers that had oppressed them. Unquestioning support of war & militarism by self proclaimed Jesus followers reveals a spiritual bankruptcy at the heart of dominant American Christian culture.

The book of Kings details how Solomon builds a temple using slave labor. These people were slaves in Egypt, God liberated them, gave them a new way to be a nation- caring for those in the same position they once were. A few generations later they’ve forgotten & are building a temple to honor the God that liberated them from slavery, using slaves. They’ve become the new Egypt- they’ve become the oppressors.

The Bible was written by people living in the Middle East who had been repeatedly conquered by one military superpower after another. Time & again they were on the receiving end of a horrific amount of imperial violence. Thus, the writers of the Bible are very suspicious of dominating empires. There are endless warnings about what happens when these empires get ahold of weapons and their insatiable desire to expand.

The Bible tells an old, old story about a small group of people, and yet as you dive into that story the implications & insights for our world & time are endless. Time and time again Jesus and the prophets call out the corrosive politics & practices of empire- presenting a new vision for humanity based on generosity and compassion, instead of greed and violence. What is political is spiritual- there is no division.