Posted on: Saturday, March 12, 2005

EXPRESSIONS OF FAITH

By Leilani Madison

I joined a study group recently at Christ Church Uniting. They were reading "Is Religion Killing Us?" by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, a professor of justice and peace studies at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minn. The author argues that both the Bible and the Quran are filled with images of a violent God, and that these religious images need to be confronted and rejected.

I grew up as a Catholic at a time when the Church discouraged the laity from reading the Bible. At age 25, I finally read it, and I was appalled at the amount of violence done in the name of God. There were just too many passages about smiting the Amalekites and dashing their infants against the rocks because God commanded it. The New Testament, with its fiery images of vengeance and apocalypse, reinforced this pitiless image of God. I concluded that the Bible was an all too human document and I lost faith in the religion I had been taught.

So how did I find my way back to a belief in Jesus? I met people who had encountered a God very different from the one I had met in my reading of the Bible. My teachers were Buddhists and they suggested that if I were looking for inner peace I might try sitting quietly and practicing an awareness of my body and my breathing. They did not ask me to believe in anything. When I began to experience the presence of God as a compassionate and tender love, I knew there was more in heaven and earth than I had imagined. I was launched on a spiritual journey.

That journey brought me to an encounter with Jesus and the realization that I needed a community of faith if I wanted to follow Him. I returned to the Catholic Church and experienced a joyous homecoming. I love the Catholic tradition with its rich symbolic expression in liturgy, its ancient teachings, its profound mystical beliefs.

When I studied the Bible again, I was still repelled by the images of God-approved violence, but this time I saw something new. All of those assertions that God had commanded that certain people be slaughtered or that God was planning to slaughter a lot of people at the end of the world were statements made by human beings using the name of God to justify their own violent desires.

I grasped why God's second commandment was "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." Many people quoted in the Bible claimed to speak for God, but they spoke out of their own fear and rage.

Our study group went on to read another book by Nelson-Pallmeyer, "Jesus Against Christianity." This book took me one step further on my journey. I realized that if I want to be a faithful follower of Jesus, I need to be part of a worshipping community that affirms the image of God I discovered in the silence and compassion of my own heart.

Our religious traditions can kill the spirit within us if we accept them without question. Studying and questioning those traditions, on the other hand, can lead to the more abundant life that Jesus offers.

Leilani Madison is a member of Christ Church Uniting in Kailua and a member of The Interfaith Alliance of Hawaii.