My Renegade Sunday School Teacher

Aunt Mary was a small and wiry mother of six; four by birth and two by informal adoption. She sang in a small querulous voice yet spoke boldly filled with loving EarthMother indigenous wisdom choices. Aunt Mary was a serenely quiet mentor and suspiciously happy Sunday School teacher in our stern Christian evangelical Bible Church where divine Revelation ended with the last apocalyptic King James chapter. Closed "Father Has Spoken" inspiration was not quite so All or Nothing clear from our Teacher's polycultural gardener and permacultural farmer perspective, with her animal husbandry perceptions offering a more inclusive Holy Spirit articulating view Of personal and communal peak therapeutic experiences, naturally revealing, spiritually fulfilling universal salvation seeking unitarian redemption finding ever more expansive universal EarthTribal sensations. Aunt Mary led our high school class theological reflections always in her quiet compassionate way A question and respond style she may have learned from reading Gospel Jesus The outdoor itinerant Teacher responding to both hostile and admiring fan questions Speaking in Beatitudes, spoken word Psalms Proverbs, impromptu Sermons on Mountains. "What did Jesus mean when he said Abba is love?" I might have asked, hoping to catch her explaining herself away from the Patriarchal personal knowledge our straight white good-news privileged preacher shared from his bully pulpit about what demonic not straight not white not strong warrior behaviors God hates. "Abba is ComPassion" invites us to become liberal only in love" she responds. This is the reverse side of becoming more conservative about risky behaviors and negative attitudes and demonic platitudes steeped in hate anger fear greed narcissism anthro-supremacism, ignorance, traumatic abuse, and chronic emotional neglect remaking god into our own dog- matic worst bad excuse for a good-news day degenerative lack of healthy imagination. "The devil made me do it" in jest curiously reminds me of "Jehovah demands I hate it" excommunicating those who sin against my limited and exclusively safe peak resonant experiences. Judgmental "Violence is mine" loudly speaks StraightWhitePrivilegedMale way back in old weaponized Testaments. This love we choose to renew each morning we often think of as compassion and Mom-inspired peace and blissful nurturing light In contrast to the traumatic night of a darkened daddy soul Yet love of God's creation, creativity, music, musicality, natural Truth and supernatural Integrity of wholesome holonic Spirit, is also openly and relentlessly curious About the depths of Earth's empowering summer soils and disempowering winter snow, About resonant healing yet also dissonant harming, About both dawn's light and dusk's revolving night. Embrace liberal love of our co-arising bicameral dipolar appositional`Spirits And conserve deep disregard for competing bipolar oppositional Souls More clear about which sheep we must be against than why God created all sheep for us to adore Who define alien Others by whom and what we are commanded and reprimanded to hate Don't even try to understand and don't slow-grow the courage to appreciate To become more resiliently curious about how and why They/We can and do love each Other in some mysterious non-Othering way beyond LeftBrain dominant understanding. Liberally love reform refine refinish your human healthy Self and sacred natural Others by uniting with whom and what we love and faithfully hope to stand. Explore radically profound courage to become more deeply organically integrally inter-religiously curious about how to more resiliently choose Each mindful day each inclusive hour each thoughtful moment within each healthy relationship, each communion, each love song of liberating compassion Thereby worrying less about conserving slow-burning political dispassions.