This book is an imagined conversation, by Ravi Zacharias, between Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha - without wanting to deride its author too much, I think anyone will easily be able to instantly recognize that to faithfully and authentic-seemingly construct such a conversation would be an immensely delicate task of anyone's imagination, even without "taking a side" - which Zacharias does, for the Christian camp. That said it is not a dogma-heavy dismantling of Buddhism - or at least not as much as it might well have been if, say, certain other evangelical thought-leaders had written it - and while I think Zacharias's ultimate finished work in this book is a relatively generous, nuanced and thoughtful one, I do not believe he truly grasps the nature of Enlightenment as Buddha taught it, as to my own hunching there would be substantively more fruitful overlap between the thinking and praxis of the two were they to actually have met and talked; it concludes not with an intellectually-humble Kingdom-seeking consideration of possible both-ands, but Zacharias putting the nails into the "Buddha wrong, Jesus right" signpost - which is fair enough given its authorial purpose, but all things considered I think is a very ideologically blinkered way of dealing with both camps - insofar as one wishes them to actually come to respectfully and honestly understand one another, which is presumably sort of the point of writing a book like this.
Another thing, that has virtually nothing to do with this book but which I'm going to talk about on here because I need to process my thoughts on it and this blog has always sufficed as a place to process similar thoughts and this post seems to be a poetically apt place for the discourse I need to shart.
I've left my church.
This was an incredibly difficult decision, as I've been going there since the age of eight - in 2002, when the church itself was also young; I was baptised there, and pretty much all of my significant discipling relationships up until my joining Church Army's Research Team have been through it. My reasons for choosing to leave are many, complex, and deeply difficult to talk about - but I've been dithering over whether to go, and then when to go, and then how to tell my elders that I was going - for probably several years by now. But as you'll know if you read the recap post for 2018; my spiritual development has been accelerating a great deal and is rather unpredictable as of late - part of this has been through the nature of my work itself, part through ongoing exposure to a greater diversity of Christian expressions - as I've said in previous posts I've joined the Anglican Mission Community of which my work is a part - and even found myself visiting quiet corners of Christendom that I two years ago never would've dreamed myself to be seen in; and underneath or alongside all of this, is another aspect of my changing identity that has felt all-but-impossible to raise in TCH - even though if I'm being honest with myself looking back I should have heard the warning klaxons in my own heart years ago. So yeh, and yep I'm writing this in summer 2020, as this whole mess was probably the main bulk of reasons why I developed such an awful blog backlog, because my mind-heart was just not in a place where I could easily reflect on anything relevant to the posts I needed to write because it was all too fresh, too harsh, too painful and sad: but - I can't actually remember exactly when it went down, but some time during May or June of 2019, already having had a thoroughly unhelpful conversation with my elders about the fact that I'd joined the Church Army Mission Community and so I couldn't in good conscience 'sign up' to the formal TCH membership, as this denies anyone who does so from being part of any other Church communities - I came out as the gender non-binary problem-child that I am to my head elder and told him up front that I knew, Acts 29's position on gender-stuff being as it was, that to remain even a non-member but attender in the church I'd grown up in would entail the constant expectation from them as my pastors that I would someday repent of my personal identity - and this was not a situation I felt was healthy, or thus acceptable, so I'm leaving, sorry, please... thank you.
I'm not writing this to make any kind of victorious or vindictive point. I'm fucking heartbroken.
I just need some place to put this whole story down, as none of my brothers and sisters from TCH are likely to want to hear it, and few if any of my closest friends outside of church life would be able to grasp the emotional point of it, and the only other people I could talk to about it would have been in the office from which I've just been fired, or else my parents, who left the same church several years ago, but for very different reasons, and I'm not 'out' to them yet and I have no idea what they'd think. Anyway, it's all so close to the bone, that even now [as time of writing being summer 2020 I've had some time to process all this but it's still raw as heck], when I am 'out' to my parents, they just don't seem to give much of a shit and I'm not really sure what they think of what I told them of my actual triggering reason for leaving the same church. But - what's in the past is in the past. Jesus is good, and God's great grace is sufficient for all. Even genderqueer Quaker shitshows like me.
I've left my church.
This was an incredibly difficult decision, as I've been going there since the age of eight - in 2002, when the church itself was also young; I was baptised there, and pretty much all of my significant discipling relationships up until my joining Church Army's Research Team have been through it. My reasons for choosing to leave are many, complex, and deeply difficult to talk about - but I've been dithering over whether to go, and then when to go, and then how to tell my elders that I was going - for probably several years by now. But as you'll know if you read the recap post for 2018; my spiritual development has been accelerating a great deal and is rather unpredictable as of late - part of this has been through the nature of my work itself, part through ongoing exposure to a greater diversity of Christian expressions - as I've said in previous posts I've joined the Anglican Mission Community of which my work is a part - and even found myself visiting quiet corners of Christendom that I two years ago never would've dreamed myself to be seen in; and underneath or alongside all of this, is another aspect of my changing identity that has felt all-but-impossible to raise in TCH - even though if I'm being honest with myself looking back I should have heard the warning klaxons in my own heart years ago. So yeh, and yep I'm writing this in summer 2020, as this whole mess was probably the main bulk of reasons why I developed such an awful blog backlog, because my mind-heart was just not in a place where I could easily reflect on anything relevant to the posts I needed to write because it was all too fresh, too harsh, too painful and sad: but - I can't actually remember exactly when it went down, but some time during May or June of 2019, already having had a thoroughly unhelpful conversation with my elders about the fact that I'd joined the Church Army Mission Community and so I couldn't in good conscience 'sign up' to the formal TCH membership, as this denies anyone who does so from being part of any other Church communities - I came out as the gender non-binary problem-child that I am to my head elder and told him up front that I knew, Acts 29's position on gender-stuff being as it was, that to remain even a non-member but attender in the church I'd grown up in would entail the constant expectation from them as my pastors that I would someday repent of my personal identity - and this was not a situation I felt was healthy, or thus acceptable, so I'm leaving, sorry, please... thank you.
I'm not writing this to make any kind of victorious or vindictive point. I'm fucking heartbroken.
I just need some place to put this whole story down, as none of my brothers and sisters from TCH are likely to want to hear it, and few if any of my closest friends outside of church life would be able to grasp the emotional point of it, and the only other people I could talk to about it would have been in the office from which I've just been fired, or else my parents, who left the same church several years ago, but for very different reasons, and I'm not 'out' to them yet and I have no idea what they'd think. Anyway, it's all so close to the bone, that even now [as time of writing being summer 2020 I've had some time to process all this but it's still raw as heck], when I am 'out' to my parents, they just don't seem to give much of a shit and I'm not really sure what they think of what I told them of my actual triggering reason for leaving the same church. But - what's in the past is in the past. Jesus is good, and God's great grace is sufficient for all. Even genderqueer Quaker shitshows like me.
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