Something About The Name…

I’ve been trying to come up with a clever, whimsical, smooth way to start this post but I think it’s best if I just jump right in. Christianity and even some spiritual concepts are not serving us the way they are authentically meant to. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t effective in their manipulated purpose. They’re actually succeeding in that area. For the past couple of months I have been struggling to find my voice., to let my light shine. I’ve done all sorts of practices that have been so engrained in me that they are as natural as breathing. Then Spirit had me going to church and while I was unsure about this new venture, I listened and did as Spirit told me to do. All of the spiritual warfare, all of the struggle mentality, stripping away old parts of me and trying to be the highest and greatest version of myself while doing the work and spiritual “stuff” has revealed greater insight. There are previous posts of this blog where I have quoted scripture or talked about God in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense. But the more I connect with myself through Spirit the more I’ve been dismantling these false narratives in not only my own life, but the greater consciousness that I (and all of us) are swimming in.

I have found my voice in prayer. I have been able to call on a higher power for guidance with that higher power pointing right back to me. I’m gonna go through some things that Spirit has shared with me along this journey that has blown my mind and felt so right in my heart. So let’s take it back over 2,000 years ago to a man named Jesus. If I’ve lost you, hold on. I promise this is gonna get good. Now, Jesus was spouting some radical thinking for his time. I often wonder if he were to show up now how would he come across visually to us. What would be the present day equivalent? What comes to mind is a hippie who would talk about love, shop at food co-ops, be vegan, grow his own food, wear Birkenstocks. You know, someone who the majority of people in America would ignore because he’s one of those “liberal socialist” guys. And I’m sure when I described him you may have envisioned a white man with long hair and a long beard. But of course given the region that Jesus was born in, he was not at all white. Jesus had melanin, lot’s of it. And not only that he was preaching to other people of color as well as poor white people who were all under Roman rule. 

Race may not have been a factor in those days (maybe) but what was certainly a social construct that the people had to contend with was class. Here comes some brown-skinned dude telling the Jewish people who the Romans considered to be less than human (ring a bell) that THEY had the kingdom of God within them. He told them that THEY had power and authority over their lives, not the Romans. So naturally the Romans got up in arms about this. And given that they were a huge empire with a far reach into many nations and regions they would feel some type of way about the someone telling their slaves and their working class that they had their own power. And to make matters worse that power didn’t even come from a Roman god. Shocking. Much of what was going on back then can be mirrored today which is why I believe that many of our ancestors clung to Jesus, because they could see the parallels in his time and their time. I don’t blame them for aligning themselves with something that they believed would bring them some sort of peace or even freedom. We know how powerful Jesus’ words were because we know that there was a bible that was specifically designed for the southern states, taking out scriptures that even hinted at liberation in the here and now rather than in the afterlife.

Jesus was also challenging the Jewish elite who were sexist. Men were intimated by the innate power of women for their ability to create life. If you plant an idea within a religious construct that all women are inherently bad then you strip them of their power and transfer it to men. Hence we refer to God as the Father who has no female counterpart to assist in the creation of life. The holy trinity makes no space for the divine feminine and I don’t know about you but both energies must be present in order to create life. Jesus included women and brought them into his ministry in a way that had not happened before. I think about Mary Magdalene. Because the scribes of the day were all men and the revisions and decisions of what would be included in the cannon we call the Bible was orchestrated by men, I question the validity of her past as a prostitute. Even Jesus’ mother, also named Mary, is relegated to a lower station. How could someone who God has chosen to carry and raise the messiah be unimportant? Do you really think God would have chosen a random woman with no spiritual insight to nurture Jesus in a way that wouldn’t lay a solid foundation for him to be able to manage the heavy burden that had been placed on him? And she traveled with him. For all intents and purposes she could be considered the O.G. Apostle. She was by his side from the moment of conception and knew who he was and what he came to do and she held space for him to grow into the man that we know today. She also encouraged and may have even taught him some things in his youth.

Ok so what am I getting at here? I think we should interrogate a religion that was taken over by the very people who considered Jewish people (which Jesus was) to be less than them (the Romans) and then turned it into a weapon for control and obedience for the masses. That would be like the United States suddenly adopting hoodoo and then repurposing and weaponizing it until its original essence was but an imagination. Gaslighting the leaders and followers, saving only the truly powerful stuff for the those who would use it for domination, giving the scraps back to its chosen people as legalism and then spreading it across the entire globe of this earth through war, violence against women, mass incarceration and killing. The correlation is not an apple to apple comparison, I simply wanted to give contextual color to what that could look like in modern times. Because Jesus wasn’t preaching a religion, he was showing us how to live, love and be as humans. And that way defies any and all religious or empirical constructs. But it serves those who only seek to rule and dominate, to give us a religion where we must wait on salvation in the afterlife. Or that we must get permission from Jesus or wait on Jesus to do something in our lives when time and again he said that WE have that permission simply because we exist. And if Jesus becomes a white man with straight hair and blue eyes and scripture after scripture says to follow him, follow his ways, what do you think that says to people of color? Especially given that Jesus is the son of God so that in turn tells us that God must be a white man. So all of our power, all of our identity, sovereignty and our permission to exercise our God-given power is to come from a white sky daddy. If Jesus were to come back right this moment I believe he would plant his hand on his head, sigh and say “y’all got it all wrong”. All the things Jesus did we each have the power and ability to do, plus more based on scripture “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” John 14:12 NIV

There’s no need to wait for permission to be great, to live in your power, to fulfill your purpose. All you need is to open up your mouth and give YOURSELF all the glory and the praise.