cyclepath8p

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remembered this card i bought at a craft fair last year.

i think we all need this message right now. ❤🙏

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A Litany I Need Right Now

God is on the side of the outcast

God is on the side of the helpless

God is on the side of the poor

God is on the side of the downtrodden

God is on the side of the sick

God is on the side of the imprisoned

God is on the side of the disabled

God is on the side of the foreigner

God is on the side of the victims of violence

Our King is Infinite Goodness

Our Judge is Infinite Justice

Our Protector is Infinite Light

He will break every power of evil

And His Love will overcome

Amen

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I became an atheist at a pretty young age, and then went on a spree over a lot of different spiritual domains in hopes of finding a place that would guide me without diminishing me; uplift me without promoting just whatever without a path.

I have yearned to be a christian again. Because there is such a big and diverse community, because it's beautiful, because it can sometimes be easier to rest in the hope that God will rescue me.

And I have. Almost a whole year ago, the thought came to me: "Jesus stands for love in first place. Acceptance, forgiveness, help, and thinking for yourself instead of obeying every authority. What if it's just the fundamentalists that ruin it?" And upon a journey with my heart opened, I found Him. I found back to His embrace. It was amazing. Even before that, I wanted to be a vessel of love, but to do that after Jesus's example and know He is proud of me for giving what is currently my best - it brought me peace.

Sometimes it's dark. Sometimes I'm miserable and in despair. But I know the way always lead back to light, no matter how long. I trusted Jesus to guide me. All I had to do was remember it, and it felt like a little break.

I'm so happy I can thank Him for all the beautiful gifts of life. I can explore it and enjoy it, I get challenges and find solutions - and I learn.

I'm so happy I can just say weird stuff like "thank you God that alcohol exists, and thank you for guiding me on the bath where I can be mindful about it" and like yeah, I'm so ecstatic about that. I love life.

Be blessed whoever reads this, and amen 💖

@ all the religious queers who follow me (or don't lol), y'all should reblog this with what your favorite part of your religion is. it could be a particular ritual, an item, a belief within it, an experience you had, anything!

we should share some good against all the bad that we get <3

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See the thing about fundamentalists and trads and Christian nationalists and MAGA evangelicals and ethnocratic bigots is that they render the faith so boring.

I take no issue with the fact that they would look at me and say that I’m not a member of the faithful because their faith is radically, inherently, ontologically distinct from mine. My God is too big and too loving and too esoteric to fit neatly into the gendered understanding of an authoritarian white father disciplining his children for not perfectly falling into lockstep. My Savior is the man who told the religious leaders “Caesar can have his idolatrous blood money, but give God your heart and your faith,” challenging the notion of an earthly ruler. My apostles wrote of the throne of man being empty—there are no masters or kings or governments, there is only Jesus Christ, Basileus Basileōn, king of kings. I believe in radical oneness with God through Christ—one flesh and one body, biblical marriage with the bridegroom whose flesh and blood make up the holy Eucharist. My faith is Queer, ancestral, esoteric, anarchist, insurrectionary, anticolonial, antiracist, unorthodox, disruptive, free. When I encounter the divine, or pray to the saints, or sit in the chapel to pray, I am experiencing communion with the sublime, in every sense of the word, the same presence that made the apostles fall to their faces before the transfiguration, that shaped the world from void, that animates the deep care and rage which boil into every aspect of my being.

When conservatives tell me I am not a Christian it is only because they cannot conceive of a Christ and a faith so big, so all encompassing, so beyond anything our human minds can comprehend, and they cannot conceive being in tune with this divinity and being left senseless by the knowledge that the divine above all else is us and loves us more than we could ever comprehend, such that experiencing this love is enough to leave one fundamentally, ontologically changed down to the fiber of their being. I feel sorrow for them. I pray that Christ may reach into their hearts and open their eyes, that they may see not only the horrors that they commit but also the deep love and freedom that awaits them through abandoning their fundamentalism and their bigotry.

Or, in other words, me every time I see another conservative Christian whining about how people aren’t doing Christianity right because they don’t adhere to a super narrow and watered down version of the faith:

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Not to be a leftist but I interpret this less as a "liberals are trying to take away our Christian right to be racist" and more that those who follow the teachings of Christ and try to dismantle and disrupt the systems of oppression that we live with will be persecuted by those who benefit from those systems of oppression and want to maintain them

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Medievalists speculate that the wound, pictured as a slit in Jesus’s side emitting blood and clear liquid, led some mystics to imagine other bodily slits that emanate blood and clear fluids. [...] Additionally, the blood of Jesus’s wounds is said to bring forth life; likewise, life is brought forth through the blood-discharging female sexual organ.

The idea of Jesus’s side wound being like a womb then led to artists showing a female — either baby or adult — being birthed from that wound. The birthed human is the Church, born through the life-giving blood of the Son of God … delivered through Jesus’s vagina. Jesus, then, becomes gender non-binary, bearing both male and female sexual organs.

Jesus’s Vagina: A Medieval Meditation // Emily Swan

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LORD,please, silence my thoughts so that I can hear Yours.

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monks with cats!

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Oh Look, Another Piece of Modesty Content Just Dropped.

A video on modesty titled "The Modesty Paradox: How We Know Revealing Clothes Are Wrong" just dropped by YouTuber Brian Holdsworth, and gee, do I have some thoughts.

The frame of the video is the speaker, Holdsworth, standing in a checkout line surrounded by women wearing leggings-- apparently, the extremely tight, ass-hugging variety. I'm imagining the one with the booty strunch thing, idk. He said EVERY part of the women's anatomy was showing and nothing was left to the imagination, so my impression of leggings as thick, middlingly tight athletic garments cannot possibly be what these women were wearing.

Here is what I imagine:

Here is what he must've been imagining:

Now, this could also be an issue of anatomy. The woman in my example is much less curvy than the model in the leggings ad. Unlike what a lot of modesty commentators say, what is immodest or immodest IS different based on the body type you have. Sorry about it. Consider getting over yourself.

But let's put aside the issue of leggings.

Holdsworth said that we can all tell certain things are immodest and immoral to wear because if he (or any other man) commented on the beauty of a legging-clad woman's ass, she would take more offence to that than if a man commented on the beauty of her hair, nails, or sandals.

This is not a coherent argument. Hair is not a living body part and has been reduced to the status of an accessory. Nail polish and shoes are literally accessories, not body parts. There is a difference between complimenting someone's clothing or accessories as opposed to someone's body part. A better example would be the difference in offence a woman would take from a man complimenting her buttocks vs another body part. There's a problem with this because, unless you have some kind of unusual physical form (abnormally high cheekbones is literally the only thing that comes to mind), about the only acceptable body part for a man to compliment a woman on is her eyes. Yes, eyes are not immodest to show.

But I would be greatly offended if a man I didn't know made a comment about how beautiful he finds my lips. I would take it as sexual harassment because that's what it would be. But obviously, lips are not immodest to show. Yet, they are sexual and sexualized.

I am struggling to think of a body part a man could compliment that would not make me feel uncomfortable.

The second reason this is incoherent is that Holdsworth, Bless him, does not know what women know about the psychology of men who make gross comments on our bodies. We know that it doesn't really matter how you're dressed. Street harassment is not about the woman; it's about the man. Further, it's mostly dependent on geography and demographics. In the city I lived in for college, to get to church (one time), I had to walk through a dangerous neighborhood and men just uttered casual rape threats. Was my ankle-length black dress just too much for them? Was I riling them up with my kirtcheif? Was my lily perfume sending them into sexual frenzy? No. No, of course it wasn't anything I did or was doing. They blurted out their thoughts on my wholly unexposed anatomy because a certain kind of man doesn't need to be brought to stumbling; they're already rolling around in the dirt.

Upright men who stumble are, I would guess, not in the habit of shouting "wut dat mouf do" when they're drawn into lust. Even a woman who is wearing revealing and sinfully immodest clothing would not and should not assume it's her clothing getting her that attention. She would rightly assume she'd just encountered a disgusting man.

The stronger element of Holdsworth's video comes near the end where he says that regardless of our intentions ("heart posture" in women's ministry lingo), the clothing we wear affects people in certain ways, and it is our duty as Christians to be cognisant of that and not cause our brothers and sisters to stumble. The issue there is that it's hard to know what causes people to stumble and what doesn't. With things like leggings, it's heavily context dependent, and there are messages from all sides telling women that they're either fine or garments of satan.

The weakest part of his video, weaker than his main argument, is his understanding of what modesty is as a virtue and as a concept. At the end of his video, he praises his wife and daughters for their modesty, and informs his viewers that it's great to dress modestly "because they always get so many compliments when they go out wearing modest dresses!" It's a section of a larger polemic that is about how you can still be beautiful and value your appearance while being modest.

I will say this gently:

It is not modest to go out attracting attention-- attention of any kind. That just isn't what modesty is. Modesty is, and I will say it again, about blending in, fading into the background, and allowing others to see Christ before they see you.

This means, in the fullest sense of it, dressing plainly, conservatively, and kind of boringly-- not like a fashion disaster (as that would also draw attention), but not like a fashion icon either.

By the number of compliments and the kind of compliments ("from charming old men"), I get the impression that his wife and daughters must be wearing what are essentially costumes, as opposed to outfits.

Visiting the grocery store dressed like this:

is in no way modest. You may as well be putting on a Snow White costume and serenading the cashier. You MIHGHT AS WELL walk around in Daisy Dukes. You should not do either.

Dressing like this, on the other hand:

will probably not rake in as many compliments, but it is much more modest in an actual sense. Even this would be better:

I hear, dear reader, you saying to me, "Gregoria, but I love fashion! Getting compliments is so nice! I feel better when I'm dressed like a fashion icon!" That is great. I'm not telling you to not do that. I'm not telling you not to dress cute or in a way that makes you happy. I am telling you that it probably isn't the most modest thing to do. Luckily, modesty is not the height of Christian Virtue.

Truly, modesty is not a fruit or gift of the Holy Spirit, it is not a heavenly virtue, and as far as I know, it cracks ZERO virtue clusters in Scripture or in Church teaching. This is not to say it's unimportant, but it is to say there is no need to crane your whole life around what is or is not modest-- I'm already doing that enough for all of us.

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Your flesh doesn't care about your eternity because it's not going with you.

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The Fetishism of the East

It's a well-known thing in the West, of a certain kind of white man who is really into East Asian women. They either exclusively date those women, or they're weird about that preference. They are ostentatiously into one kind of asian culture or another, whether it be anime, the food, history, or religion. In the worst of cases, they're "passport bros" who fly to Indonesia, Thailand, or Japan to participate in sex tourism. Once they get their hands on an East Asian girl, they usually do love her, but they love what she is, not who she is; they like that she's another souvenir, another fashion accessory, another Funko Pop to put on the shelf.

We can all agree that this is extremely weird, but these kinds of men are usually non-religious and participants in other subcultures that require flexible morals, so I never really have to interact with them --aside from that one I accidentally dated who thought Middle Eastern was close enough to Japanese.

However, I do have to interact with another kind of Eastern fetishist: Western men who fetishize Eastern Orthodoxy.

This is a fixation (an obsession?) that otherwise pious, religious (mostly Latin and Protestant) men allow themselves to participate in because, at least on the surface, there isn't that same sexual element that there is with Weebs. They see their fixation as just another part of their spiritual growth. This would be fine if these guys were merely entertaining a personal fancy, or expressing admiration or enjoyment, but at a certain point, it just feels like they want to take the East away from Orthodoxy.

At first, they seem normal enough. They love Byzantine iconography, and gee, who doesn't? They like Orthodox chants, and they listen to Russian choirs. They take up the traditional fasts.

Then, they adorn themselves with Orthodox symbolism and spiritual materials-- the Russian Crucifix, the Greek metals; they carry around the eastern Cross and an Orthodox prayer book. They bought a "blessed oil" (impossible) that smells like incense, and they rub it all over themselves and their personal effects.

When they meet you, an Orthodox person, they grill you about "The Orthodox perspective on" xyz. These days, it's the pope, or maybe liturgical reform if they're feeling adventurous. They talk about how much they prefer Orthodoxy and the East to their own church, but when you ask if they want to convert, they respond with disgust.

Their interest in Orthodoxy, the East, in Byzantium, and so on is just about adding another piece of trim and tackle to their radtrad outfit. Dressing themselves in it makes them look more based to their Western friends. Nevermind the probelms with progressivism, simony, and eccumanism with the Greeks; nevermind the rampant superstision among the Slavs; nevermind the segregated coffee hours with the Antiochians. They make an idol of it all anyways.

I suppose because I can speak Arabic, I run into this a lot and find it most disturbing, but I'm especially peeved with Araboo Orthodox fetishists. Here, sometimes it does become sexually fetishistic-- praising and sexualizing Arab and MENA women while degrading American woman. They enterchangably play chants and nasheeds under their posts, and because they cant speak Arabic, they sometimes use audios that sing the Blasphemies of the Dome of the Rock.

At a certian point, you realize it isn't about appriciation; it's about taking something away and assimilating it into the West. Eventually, they say that the West (meaning Western catholicism or protestantism) was always the true custodian of this or that practice. It's made especially insulting if whatever practice they're talking about isn't actually ancient, but rather, post-schism or even quite new (as in the 1800s). You correct them, and they take it as a personal attack.

They want your opinion until you're critical of problems in their Church or your own, and they're interested in what chants you like until they're not Russian or choral enough, or you like a style of Icon that they don't, or you don't veil like the protestant infulencers they see.

It's disheartening. It's especially disheartening because normally, these men are really nice otherwise.

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dinner (?) plans

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they makenme sisickkk

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Very small snippet of a VERY unfinished animation. Freaks!

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NEURAL PATTERNS OF SELF-HATE || comic

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favorites from the reddit ama with gianni