In Dr Suess’ story “Sneetches”, the star bellied Sneetches have the best food, the most fun, the greatest privilege, while the starless Sneetches are disdained, marginalised, left out.
Along comes Sylvester McMonkey McBean, with hope for the downtrodden Starless – a machine that will put a star on them for only $3 each. They become the Star-Bellied, join the in-group. Which doesn’t suit the original Star-Bellied Sneetches at all – so of course they take up the offer to remove their stars for $10 each, restoring the social order: "We know who is who! Now there isn't a doubt. The best kind of Sneetches are Sneetches without!" The situation quickly escalates into a rhyming frenzy of Sneetches receiving stars, removing stars, round and round, trying to achieve and retain social standing.
Then, when every last cent
Of their money was spent,
The Fix-it-Up Chappie packed up
And he went.
And he laughed as he drove
In his car up the beach,
"They never will learn.
No. You can't teach a Sneetch!"
But McBean was quite wrong.
I'm quite happy to say
That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day,
The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.
That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether they had one, or not, upon thars.
A happy ending, a good moral.
Maybe has something in common with the promise of Paul: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)
Fascinating, life giving words.
Invitation to deepest identity.
And perhaps hint of promise to the marginalised, of threat to the privileged.
Apparently the Orthodox Jewish prayer book contains the blessing, “Blessed is God who has not made me a Gentile, who has not made me a slave, who has not made me a woman”. (And the custom in Orthodox circles is for women to substitute “who has made me according to his will” when they recite it.) Some Jewish movements have done away with the words of this blessing entirely, some have reframed them to be positive “Blessed is God who made me an Israelite, a free person, in his image.” (The Jewish Annotated New Testament by Amy-Jill Levine.)
Paul may not have carried his own theology to its radical conclusions – there’s no excuse for telling women to be silent in church, doesn’t matter what some women are saying in some contexts. But his insistence that these categories, important enough to shape a blessing and a worldview, to determine rights and privileges, cannot contain or define us when we belong to Christ, are Children of God, is truly incredible.
The Sneetches simply end up rejecting star based categories as meaningful. Paul is talking about a new creation – a new framework for existence.
You might have heard in verse 28, Paul switches to male and female, doesn’t use male or female as is his pattern with Jew or Greek, slave or free? That’s probably because he wants us to think of Genesis 1:27; “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Conventional order and values do not have the greatest claim. What counts is being in Christ: that is where transformation and newness begins. What if the most special thing about you is what you have in common with so many others? What if categories and binaries cannot take us all the way into the Kingdom of Heaven?
War and peace, truth and lies, good and bad, life and death, able and disabled, light and dark, hope and fear. When we pit categories against each other, cling to sides, how far can we go into the heart of the One Creator?
Stages of faith by James Fowler was published in 1981. He developed a theory of six stages of faith development – in which faith is not a set of beliefs but the universal human activity of meaning-making. His theory draws on Piaget’s stages of Cognitive Development, and Kohlber’s stages of Moral Development. Stages are pegged to ages, but people don’t necessarily move through all the stages as they age. Don’t panic if you don’t identify with this theory – it is not the final word on faith, just one way of looking at it. I'm sure there has been lots of critique done in the last 37 years. I’m particularly interested in what the later stages say about paradox, duality, and oneness. (I read a few basic synopsis articles online. This is the main one I drew from.)
The first two stages are “Intuitive-Projective” and “Mythic-Literal”. Stage three is “Synthetic-Conventional” – characterised by interpersonal connections and authority of respected leaders. Stage four is “Individuative-Reflective” – characterised by explicit examination of your own faith structures and commitments; previously valued authorities can be challenged by understanding that faith traditions have a political history. These two stages are pegged to adolescence or young adulthood, but can easily extend throughout life.
Conjunctive Faith, stage five: involves embracing and integrating opposites and polarities in your life. For example, realising in mid life that you are both young and old. Or coming to terms with the fact that you are both saint and sinner. That death is part of life.
Then Universalizing Faith, stage six, takes those who travel there beyond paradox and polarities to a sense of being grounded in Oneness with God. Passionate yet detached spending of the self in love, living the kingdom of God.
Richard Rohr talks along these lines:
Dualistic thinking is the well-practiced pattern of knowing most things by comparison. And for some reason, once you compare or label things (that is, “judge” them), you almost always conclude that one is good and the other is less good or even bad. In the first half of life, this provides ego boundaries and clear goals, which creates a nice clean “provisional personality.” But it is not close to the full picture that we call truth.
Dualistic thinking works only for a while to get us started, but if we are honest, it stops being helpful in most real-life situations. It is fine for teenagers to think that there is some moral or “supernatural” superiority to their chosen baseball team, their army, their ethnic group, or even their religion or gender; but one hopes that later in life they learn that such polarity is just an agreed-upon game. Your frame should grow larger as you move toward the Big Picture in which one God creates all and loves all, both Dodgers and Yankees, blacks and whites, Palestinians and Jews, gays and straights, Americans and Afghanis.
Non-dualistic thinking or both-and thinking is the benchmark of our growth into the second half of life. This more calm and contemplative seeing does not appear suddenly, but grows almost unconsciously over many years of conflict, confusion, healing, broadening, loving, and forgiving reality. It emerges gradually as we learn to “incorporate the negative,” learn from what we used to exclude, or, as Jesus put it, “forgive our enemies” both within and without.
You no longer need to divide the field of every moment between up and down, totally right or totally wrong, for or against. It just is what it is.This inner calm allows you to confront what must be confronted with even greater clarity and incisiveness. This stance is not at all passivity. It is, in fact, the essential link between true contemplation and skillful action. The big difference is that your small and petty self is now out of the way, and if God wants to use you or love you, which God always does, God’s chances are far better now!
War and peace, truth and lies, good and bad, life and death, able and disabled, light and dark, hope and fear. When we pit categories against each other, cling to sides, how far can we go into the heart of the One Creator, the Kingdom of Heaven? Yet if we claim we have transcended categories without the transformative working of Christ within us, we run the risk of white-washing lines of oppression and marginalisation for our convenience. In the proposed panel series “Our lives in tension” I hope we can explore these issues together.
How might we develop our faith and understanding – to see and confront dualisms that limit and reduce, to be transformed to a new creation in Christ?
Along comes Sylvester McMonkey McBean, with hope for the downtrodden Starless – a machine that will put a star on them for only $3 each. They become the Star-Bellied, join the in-group. Which doesn’t suit the original Star-Bellied Sneetches at all – so of course they take up the offer to remove their stars for $10 each, restoring the social order: "We know who is who! Now there isn't a doubt. The best kind of Sneetches are Sneetches without!" The situation quickly escalates into a rhyming frenzy of Sneetches receiving stars, removing stars, round and round, trying to achieve and retain social standing.
Then, when every last cent
Of their money was spent,
The Fix-it-Up Chappie packed up
And he went.
And he laughed as he drove
In his car up the beach,
"They never will learn.
No. You can't teach a Sneetch!"
But McBean was quite wrong.
I'm quite happy to say
That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day,
The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.
That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether they had one, or not, upon thars.
A happy ending, a good moral.
Maybe has something in common with the promise of Paul: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)
Fascinating, life giving words.
Invitation to deepest identity.
And perhaps hint of promise to the marginalised, of threat to the privileged.
Apparently the Orthodox Jewish prayer book contains the blessing, “Blessed is God who has not made me a Gentile, who has not made me a slave, who has not made me a woman”. (And the custom in Orthodox circles is for women to substitute “who has made me according to his will” when they recite it.) Some Jewish movements have done away with the words of this blessing entirely, some have reframed them to be positive “Blessed is God who made me an Israelite, a free person, in his image.” (The Jewish Annotated New Testament by Amy-Jill Levine.)
Paul may not have carried his own theology to its radical conclusions – there’s no excuse for telling women to be silent in church, doesn’t matter what some women are saying in some contexts. But his insistence that these categories, important enough to shape a blessing and a worldview, to determine rights and privileges, cannot contain or define us when we belong to Christ, are Children of God, is truly incredible.
The Sneetches simply end up rejecting star based categories as meaningful. Paul is talking about a new creation – a new framework for existence.
You might have heard in verse 28, Paul switches to male and female, doesn’t use male or female as is his pattern with Jew or Greek, slave or free? That’s probably because he wants us to think of Genesis 1:27; “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Conventional order and values do not have the greatest claim. What counts is being in Christ: that is where transformation and newness begins. What if the most special thing about you is what you have in common with so many others? What if categories and binaries cannot take us all the way into the Kingdom of Heaven?
War and peace, truth and lies, good and bad, life and death, able and disabled, light and dark, hope and fear. When we pit categories against each other, cling to sides, how far can we go into the heart of the One Creator?
Stages of faith by James Fowler was published in 1981. He developed a theory of six stages of faith development – in which faith is not a set of beliefs but the universal human activity of meaning-making. His theory draws on Piaget’s stages of Cognitive Development, and Kohlber’s stages of Moral Development. Stages are pegged to ages, but people don’t necessarily move through all the stages as they age. Don’t panic if you don’t identify with this theory – it is not the final word on faith, just one way of looking at it. I'm sure there has been lots of critique done in the last 37 years. I’m particularly interested in what the later stages say about paradox, duality, and oneness. (I read a few basic synopsis articles online. This is the main one I drew from.)
The first two stages are “Intuitive-Projective” and “Mythic-Literal”. Stage three is “Synthetic-Conventional” – characterised by interpersonal connections and authority of respected leaders. Stage four is “Individuative-Reflective” – characterised by explicit examination of your own faith structures and commitments; previously valued authorities can be challenged by understanding that faith traditions have a political history. These two stages are pegged to adolescence or young adulthood, but can easily extend throughout life.
Conjunctive Faith, stage five: involves embracing and integrating opposites and polarities in your life. For example, realising in mid life that you are both young and old. Or coming to terms with the fact that you are both saint and sinner. That death is part of life.
Then Universalizing Faith, stage six, takes those who travel there beyond paradox and polarities to a sense of being grounded in Oneness with God. Passionate yet detached spending of the self in love, living the kingdom of God.
Richard Rohr talks along these lines:
Dualistic thinking is the well-practiced pattern of knowing most things by comparison. And for some reason, once you compare or label things (that is, “judge” them), you almost always conclude that one is good and the other is less good or even bad. In the first half of life, this provides ego boundaries and clear goals, which creates a nice clean “provisional personality.” But it is not close to the full picture that we call truth.
Dualistic thinking works only for a while to get us started, but if we are honest, it stops being helpful in most real-life situations. It is fine for teenagers to think that there is some moral or “supernatural” superiority to their chosen baseball team, their army, their ethnic group, or even their religion or gender; but one hopes that later in life they learn that such polarity is just an agreed-upon game. Your frame should grow larger as you move toward the Big Picture in which one God creates all and loves all, both Dodgers and Yankees, blacks and whites, Palestinians and Jews, gays and straights, Americans and Afghanis.
Non-dualistic thinking or both-and thinking is the benchmark of our growth into the second half of life. This more calm and contemplative seeing does not appear suddenly, but grows almost unconsciously over many years of conflict, confusion, healing, broadening, loving, and forgiving reality. It emerges gradually as we learn to “incorporate the negative,” learn from what we used to exclude, or, as Jesus put it, “forgive our enemies” both within and without.
You no longer need to divide the field of every moment between up and down, totally right or totally wrong, for or against. It just is what it is.This inner calm allows you to confront what must be confronted with even greater clarity and incisiveness. This stance is not at all passivity. It is, in fact, the essential link between true contemplation and skillful action. The big difference is that your small and petty self is now out of the way, and if God wants to use you or love you, which God always does, God’s chances are far better now!
War and peace, truth and lies, good and bad, life and death, able and disabled, light and dark, hope and fear. When we pit categories against each other, cling to sides, how far can we go into the heart of the One Creator, the Kingdom of Heaven? Yet if we claim we have transcended categories without the transformative working of Christ within us, we run the risk of white-washing lines of oppression and marginalisation for our convenience. In the proposed panel series “Our lives in tension” I hope we can explore these issues together.
How might we develop our faith and understanding – to see and confront dualisms that limit and reduce, to be transformed to a new creation in Christ?