By now, I almost want to stay numb and depressed, but I am still just stubborn enough, I guess, to not want to give evil , insane, war-mongering, greedy, immoral, or just plain foolish people what they want. And every day I am reminded that there are good people in the world, and that the planet is ours to save, and that America really, honestly, needed to change anyway, so if it has to change by a trial by fire, so be it, I will keep working with the fire brigade as best I can.
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So you know that awful feeling when your leg and foot fall asleep — the numb, painful tingles? and how it is excruciating to stand? Well, I remind myself that even though both legs, arms, and my mind are numbed and in pain, tingling with disbelief, anger and sorrow, I remind myself that the house is on fire, so I gotta keep getting up and keep moving toward The Way, toward Goodness and Light. Folks, the fire is raging, but despite our desire to give in to the numbness — we gotta vote for democracy and a return to reason, vote with our dollars, yell, move, and stand and deliver, ya’all.
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And those of us who have tried, failingly to be sure, but have tried, to walk The Way with the idea that the God of the Bible and Jesus have the most loving, gracious, justice-freedom toting message of all — meaning Love above all and for ALL — we need to speak out and more importantly LIVE OUT, what God is really like and what Jesus really taught and lived. Because what those greedy warmongers, foolish fear-mongers, judgmental non-thinkers, and sleight-of-hand shysters in the halls of power, both under the guise of American and Religious powers, are trying to sell you are selling you fire policies for houses underwater, not Life Policies for Houses built on The Rock of True Life.
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May your numbness be not more than you can bear to carry today. May you let your anger make you determined, your sorrow make you compassionate, and your numbness let you know that we need each other and we are not alone. Then, unlike the person mentioned in this article — Think about others and as The Good Book advices, when you can, “think on these things: whatever is true, right, pure, honorable, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praisworthy.” (Philippians 4:8)
We are numb, we are afraid, we are angry and sad, but lastly remember — no matter what the end point is — Hope is free and Love is forever.
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This is from a long, hard read about just the latest insanity in America, but it sums it all up with facts. It is from a great newsletter you can find on Facebook and Substack called: Oregon’s Bay Area, by a mother/ daughter team, the Geddry’s.
Here is a quote near the punchline of this article: “That is the connective tissue between Trump’s redistricting brag, his openness to sending National Guard or ICE to voting locations, his terror of a Democratic House with subpoena power, and the GOP’s willingness to keep funding the whole circus. They are not waiting for Trump to become normal. They are trying to preserve power long enough to make normal voters irrelevant.
HCR also ties the economic story together: the Iran war, Trump’s ballroom, tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, the rising debt, and the larger question of what Republicans are doing with public money. That question may define the summer. Americans are being asked to pay for the war, pay for higher gas prices, pay for the debt from tax cuts for the rich, brace for cuts to programs they rely on, and somehow also pay for Trump’s vanity projects and personal legal escape hatches.
Trump said he does not think about Americans. Today’s news is the receipt.
Fuel prices are up and the war bill is climbing, but Americans are not on his mind. The Pentagon dodges questions about munitions and costs, but Americans are not on his mind. Iran retains most of its missiles and the Strait stays closed, but Americans are not on his mind. He boards Air Force One with billionaires and flies to Beijing to open markets for corporate America, but Americans are not on his mind. His Justice Department quietly explores a settlement that could immunize him from financial scrutiny, but Americans are not on his mind. His party rigs maps, dodges oversight, and works methodically to make democratic accountability harder to enforce, but Americans are not on his mind.”
And so — instead of THAT kind of mind — “Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”. (Paul) “Let your love extend to all beings” (Buddha) “Love is the ultimate truth at the heart of creation”. (Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita) “Yes, goodness and faithful love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will live in the LORD’s house as long as I live.” (Psalm 23 from Hebrew Scriptures)
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Jesus as recorded in Matthew 22).
Dichotomy vs. The Divine: There is Plenty of Amniotic Fluid for Us All
By Jane Tawel
January 8, 2026
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We have created a false dichotomy-ridden world — my team vs. your team, your politics vs. my politics, my god vs. your God, us vs. them. Our dichotomization of the world we live in extends to our philosophy, theology, worldview, plan for living — whatever you would like to name that which claims you and how you think and how you behave. We give these various worldviews names so we can contrast them, own them, follow them, when facts or life seem to intrude on the mysterious truth of our Meaning. We feel we must have something to fight that gives our achievements the savoring quality that metaphorically, a plain diet of bread and water does not fulfill. Competition becomes the spice of our lives whether we know it or not and creates sound-proofed walls around our religions, our national loyalties, our genders and races and economic statuses, and around our football teams. But here is the thing I have been learning, small little nibble by small nibble, in the works of people like Walter Wink, Paul Tillich, Richard Rohr, and Marcus Borg among others: our dichotomies have almost severed our relationships to other humans and to The Divine. We are hanging by a thread to the Real, which some call God or Spirit or The Divine or the Universal. There are several causes of this, and I am sure I am not at all smart enough or aware enough to know them all, but the number one cause, I think, of our estrangement from God is that we see God as the distant over-seer of a dichotomized belief-system. And what God says over and over in the Hebrew Bible, in the Christian Testaments, in the Quaran, in the Hindu Vedas, and in the glorious, achingly beautiful scriptures of the Natural World is this: God/Spirit/ Divine/ Creator wants loving, compassionate, truthful Relationship with every human being — a relationship as close as our heartbeat, as close as our breath, as close as a lover, as close as Mother’s womb.
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Imagine if we thought of every immigrant, every Palestinian, every person of color, every unhoused person on our streets, every differently gender-identified person, every person from the other team as swimming in God’s Womb with us? Picture it: Here we are floating along together in Mother’s care and there is plenty of amniotic fluid for all of us. Or imagine that we begin to see God as a Father who doesn’t love any of His kids any more than His other children? And this God-Father, that allows us to call Him, “Daddy”, “Da-da”, always sees us as His little innocent baby who really can’t talk all that well because our words are limited, and really can’t think all that well because we can’t see much past our own little toes and we can’t reach much further than Da-Da’s Face as He holds us, and as Daddy places us in Mother’s arms, which are the same as His arms, we can’t really get nourishment from anything other than God-Mom’s ever-flowing- with-Life-giving-nourishment Breast. Is this not what all the teachings of Truth, True-Truth, try to show us with metaphors and parables and myths — all those human creations that struggle toward those Realities beyond the material and beyond our egoic-minds and beyond the struggling wrestlings with the limits of language that give us just an inkling of our own created creativeness in the image of the Creator?
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Let’s be honest: relationships can be tough. I don’t know about you, but I have never had any kind of relationship: friend, spouse, child, parent, relative, co-worker, boss — you name it — that has proceeded in a lovely little straight line forward, like a smooth road with no hills, no bumps, no muddy potholes. And some of these bumps and potholes are frankly of the other person’s making and lots and lots more of them are of my own making. But if you commit long-term to being in a relationship as I have been privileged to do with my hubby, my children, and a few close companions on The Way, then you can see the trials as part of being a human being who is meant, like all in and of this lovely Creation/ Nature, meant to let go in order to hold on to something new, to get lost and seek in order to find, and to, just as the trees who lose their leaves to grow new ones do, to die daily to our old sense of self in order to be reborn to new life. And to find a more intimate loving relationship with Another that without those bumps and trials and vulnerable achings would not have been possible yesterday.
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When I read what now I have come to think the Bible was supposed to provide for us — stories about real people’s struggling relationships with The Divine Real (God) — I realize that much of my life and hence, my belief system, has been about making God into my image. God is so often only close if I think of God as an “It” that can fit in my heart, kinda like Jesus, and be used as needed. But God is also so often been at the same time, a distant figure Who has dichotomized the world into haves and have-nots, thems and us-es, good and bad, my religious team against their religious team, and heaven-bound folks against the hell-bound. God has been for most of my life a powerful patriarch of my own religious views that I need to beg for what I want, that judges my every action and thought, and that I hope will forgive me enough to allow me as I am to live forever as I am, while sending to hell the people whom I deem unworthy. And then I throw Jesus into this mix as someone who was God but died and “paid up” all my debts so I don’t have to worry about my connection with God any more because Jesus had a special relationship with God on my behalf. And when you put it that way in words — it sounds as crazy and insincere and messed-up as it is. Right? Because what The Divine/ Creator / God — whatever you can still with love call Spirit in and of, but also beyond and above this material existence — what Parent-Spirit wants is not our sacrifices, not our offerings, not our achievements — but our loving hearts connecting to THE IAM Loving Heart.
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As a parent of four adult children, I can confirm: when I am filled with true love (compassion, desire, care, obsession, commitment, adoration) of my four children, now adults — when I am full to the brim of That Which Loves and Only Loves — then all I want is to Be with them, in relationship, in relationship, in relationship. Why can not I trust, have faith, that God in the Purity of His Grace, wants this with me, Her child?
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There is this old rock and roll song and one of the lines about the romantic relationship between the two lovers has stuck in my mind all these years. It is partly because I grew up when you had to figure out the lyrics to songs by hearing them over and over on the radio or sometimes on the LP you had bought. Ah, life before computer screen immediacy of information — how sometimes I do miss it! So, for this song that we heard on the radio, the important line was a bit hard to understand, and we had a friend one time riding in the back seat of mom’s car with us, and she was adamant that the catchy line was: “For you are Amanda and I am Steve”. And you know that works for what I am trying to say about God. God wants to be our Amanda or Steve to our Steve or Amanda, depending on which gendered name we want to identify with. The Divine wants to be as close as a lover in the act of loving the beloved — God wants to name us and be named — and this understanding of God is all over the Bible texts and many other spiritual texts as well. But the true lyric of this song, which eventually we preteens in the back of that car finally figured out, reveals something also true about what The Divine wants us to understand about Her which is also metaphoric and anthropomorphic, because of course God is incomprehensible and beyond our human understanding, despite our centuries of boxing Him up and defining Her in controllable, bite-sized bits. We still laugh today about our confusion about what the lyrics actually were to that song, which were: “For you are a magnet, and I am steel”.
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Today I am on a journey by way of, not fighting, not running or even walking, but of Being — being in the kind of relationship with what I call God, that people throughout history have sought with The Divine Mystery/Reality. I am letting go of my striving in small moments as well as I can to find: “resting”, “cradling” and “hiding in”. I am asking The Divine Creator to “create in me a new heart”, to “hide me in the Rock”, to be the “Mother Bear to my cub-ness” to let me be the “chick to Her Mother Hen”, “the son returned to the Loving Father”, and the “little lamb to the Shepherd who lives among us sheep”. These are all metaphoric relationships found in my primary Scripture, the Judeo-Christian Bible, but they are true to all True-Truths throughout our known history of humankind. We just have either forgotten or neglected that Truth and chosen to set up the golden calves of our preferred individualistic idols that have led us, like the lost sheep, astray.
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The next time I feel the old dichotomies of us vs. them rise-up in me, I will try to remember that in Christ there is no us and them. The next time I want to cling to the black and whites that seem to build a foundation for me I will remind myself they are foundations built on sand, and like the sands of Time, they melt away in the Flow of Eternal Truths — beyond space and time and where black and white are forever, only Light. The next time I feel what I call God is distant, needy, controlling — a monarch to be feared and to whom I must beg — I will lightly touch my breath and pray, “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me and breathe into me Your Life”. The next time I feel angry or alone, I will let God know how I feel, just as I would my most intimate lover and I will trust that my relationship will grow through honest vulnerability to He Who Loves me. The next time I despair at all I think or fear all that I feel, I will thank my Mother-God, that She holds me safe in Her Womb, safe in Her arms, and safe in Her Love. In fact, she “holds the whole world — tree, rock, lizard, bee and my enemy — in her loving hands.
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And I will ask Love to let me begin to see the Universal Christ not as a small, locked security-deposit-safe, but as a free-flowing Ocean of compassion for all — not just enough, but so much that it breaks our nets of prejudice, and spills out of our baskets of miserly grasping, and runs to our prodigals with forgiveness and joy and connection — just as our Father runs to embrace and welcome us.
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Relationship. Scary, isn’t it? Yes, one hesitates in any relationship to be vulnerable. But I have found that a life of putting on the armor of constant battle is exhausting, confusing, and leads to a life of negativity. I am trying bit by bit, to unshackle myself from old ideas, and to free myself from the battlements I have let my thoughts create. I ask The Divine, to create in me Her Spirit, and to be unarmored except with the “the breastplate of faith and love, and a helmet of the hope of salvation”. I appeal with no small amount of trepidation but also quite a bit of excitement at what I might discover about the Lover of My Soul and That which longs to live not just with me but within me. And I can call this “Other that is All and is My Truest Self” God — or I can call it Mother, Father, Divine Spirit, Creator — or I can call it Amanda or Steve. True Lovers have lots of names for each other. But no matter what names we use, I want to learn, day by day, hour by hour, breath by breath, to be the longing heart of Steel to the Magnet of Universal Compassionate Truth that draws all the world, all of us, to The Pulsing Heart of the Eternal Lover.
Jane Tawel 