Speakeasy

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[Michael Morrell @Genuine_Michael]

Thank you for your warm reception to my new podcast, 'The Evolutionary Revolutionary: Opti-Mystic Ways That Work'! In my inaugural episode, I’m in conversation with Dr. @DanielFoor, author of 'Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing' and founder of Ancestral Medicine, a global community of practitioners doing ancestral lineage healing work.

We’re living in times when the past feels unbearably present. We’re reckoning with histories of violence and colonization. We’re watching our elders die, sometimes alone. We’re inheriting a planet in crisis and wondering: what kind of ancestors will we be?

What if your ancestors aren’t just memories, but living presences who can still offer—and receive—healing?

If you grew up a Protestant (and further fundie) Christian like me, that question might trigger alarm bells. 'Isn’t this necromancy? Isn’t this everything our preachers and teachers warned us against?'

Yet something in us longs for this connection—lighting candles for departed loved ones, sensing a grandmother’s prayers still holding us, feeling the weight of history moving through our bodies.

Daniel’s work suggests we don’t have to navigate these waters alone. There might be wisdom, healing, and even repair available through renewed relationship with those who came before us—and with those who will come after.

Dive right in here! https://t.co/Ycu9Ohci6Y

[Michael Morrell @Genuine_Michael]

USAmerica turned two hundred and fifty last month, and I have been trying to figure out what to feel.

I know what the fireworks wish to evoke. I know what feelings the flags folded into car windows and the beer commercials and the drone shows spelling 250 against the night sky want to swell in my chest. But a birthday is a strange thing to celebrate when the birthday-subject is not sure whether it wants to keep lurching forward in a zombified half-life, or whether it’s willing to let the parts of itself that are perishing finally die so that something truer can be born.

I’m not going about this perfectly at all, but I aim to inhabit the full range of life, from Spirit to sinew. So when it comes to reflecting on my country of birth, let me light a birthday candle for this aging, contradictory, God-haunted country — while I also refuse to look away from our national wound, which is deep, and old, and bleeding through its bandages afresh.

Here’s the unflinching truth as I see it in this summer of our two hundred and fiftieth year: we’re living through a season of graft dressed up as governance, of oligarchs seated at the head of the national table while the price of eggs and rent and ground beef climbs past the reach of the people who actually make our country work from day to day. We’re watching masked agents pull our neighbors out of courthouses and shopping centers, off factory floors and from the arms of their children, the administration in charge having the chutzpah to call it ‘order’ while the ostensible ‘opposition’ party sits nearly-mutely in the cuck chair. We de-fund vital aid projects the world over in the name of ‘government efficiency’ while millions of children starve. We are funding, arming, and shrugging at a butchery in Gaza that history will not let us un-see. We deny and dismantle vital common-good programs at home and abroad, running these ‘savings’ to war chests, mass-surveillance, billionaires and our world’s first newly-minted trillionaire, daring to call this massive wealth grift ‘big’ and ‘beautiful.’ We have made cruelty efficient and called it ‘strength.’

I do not pen this truth to stoke despair. I write it because lament is often the beginning of prayer; "A broken spirit is my sacrifice, God. You won’t despise a heart, God, that is broken and crushed..." (Psalm 51:17, CEB) I don’t know how to reach credible hope without walking through this valley of the shadow of national death. As the author of Scripture’s Lamentations sorrowed,

“My eyes are spent with weeping;
my stomach churns;
my bile is poured out on the ground
because of the destruction of my people,
because infants and babes faint
in the streets of the city.”
(Lamentations 2:11, NRSVUE)

The prophets don’t look away, so I guess I won’t either.

But I want to propose something to you — something I’ve come to believe deep in my belly: I believe the document this country was founded on was only ever half of the revolution. I believe the other half has been waiting, patient as a seed, in the soil of our shared history the entire time. And I believe the birthday gift this nation actually needs is not some tired reiteration of the Declaration of Independence.

It is a Declaration of Interdependence.

Let me show you what I mean: https://t.co/sp3cYsjP7S

[Michael Morrell @Genuine_Michael]

The river of Holy Spirit washes the human wound, and none of us are meant to heal alone.

Meet my friend Fr. Castello — an LGBTQ-affirming Old Catholic priest — as he speaks on the closet and the altar; the long road home to God...and to a deeper experience of himself.

"There is not a wound on earth that heaven cannot touch."

This one's worth your time: https://t.co/eTgsaELmeO

[Michael Morrell @Genuine_Michael]

I'm sorry about all the 'Christian' hate, @LilNasX! I find the honesty of your search (in *all* directions) refreshing, and Jesus is pretty rad despite some branches of his fan club!

I'd love to share this bonus chapter with you of a book I wrote with Franciscan friar Richard Rohr about an open-hearted, wide-awake, beautiful (but non-sentimental) Christian path, 'The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation.' If you end up wanting to read the whole thing, feel free to reach out.

And no matter what, I hope you stay true to you, and consider what Rainer Maria Rilke says: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” https://t.co/YmkumSdagY

[Michael Morrell @Genuine_Michael]

"Biblical scholars have long known that the language of salvation encompasses far more than just our eternal destiny. What this book does is work out what this might look like in the church’s life, both in the believer’s enjoyment of abundant life and the sharing of that life with those who do not yet believe. Instead of a program, Teasdale offers a paradigm shift while encouraging congregations to set their own measurable goals to address standards of living, quality of life, and the embrace of eternal life in Christ that together encompass the abundant life."
— Bob on Books, for @SpeakeasyOnTap

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

RT @Genuine_Michael: "['You Are Us'] moves from our inner healing to a posture of responsiveness that claims the freedom over our emotions…

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

...daring to address contemporary questions of gender and sexuality, as well as accounting for the Dead Sea Scrolls revolution in Hebrew Bible scholarship.

I'm really enjoying it so far. Here's our fave edition: https://t.co/EO81AfOrqI

Trippy Bible Story Art: MidJourney+Me

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

Did you know that, in Exodus' telling, Elohim shares a trippy meal with Moses, Aaron, and 70 elders of Israel before giving Moses the Decalogue (10 Commandments)?

It's such a bizarre aside, and one of my favorite enigmatic Bible stories. Here it is:

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

"...They beheld God, and they ate and drank."

This is how Exodus 24:9-11 is translated in the Updated Edition of the NRSV, aka the NRSVue. Did you know this was a thing? It's the first update of the favored progressive/mainline Bible translation in 30 years...

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

"...Highly recommended."

https://t.co/1usspDCisr

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

"Long Story Short does an excellent job of giving an overview of the entire Bible and the meaning behind the message. Thornton is someone who loves stories, as his frequent apt movie quotes show, and he understands how stories can be life-changing."

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

" It’s a fast read, but an excellent resource for anyone. I actually have a degree in Biblical Studies, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It would also be ideal for someone new to the study of the Bible, or who just wants to better understand a book that’s been so influential..."

[Whitney Hope @Stay_Woke_Yo]

Think I'm actually gonna read this.
Just re-read God VS Gay again...Great Book btw....

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

"She is free of the dictates of family and culture.” In this case, Mary serves as a beacon for us to consider our wholeness outside of the expectations and desires of others."

https://t.co/908IToQrRm

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

"Our faith had little use for Mary; in fact, we derided Catholics for “worshiping" her. &yet after leaving the Pentecostal church, I find myself ever more intrigued by Mary+traditions valuing her highly. What could I learn about Mary &more importantly what could I learn from her?

[Speakeasy @speakeasyontap]

"Instead of focusing on sexual purity, Paintner describes how in this case the Virgin archetype signifies wholeness. Paintner explains, “The Virgin archetype is whole, belonging to herself, and impregnated with divine love. ‘She is who she is because that is who she is...

[Michael Morrell @Genuine_Michael]

It was my joy to sit down with my dear friend @Quadratos recently, to talk about walking nature’s mystical path in our dialogue for the Mystics Summit. Thanks to special arrangement, I’m now able to share this conversation with you in its entirety!

[Michael Morrell @Genuine_Michael]

Do you ever find yourself experiencing sheer joy while tuning in to the insights of someone who's clearly at the top of their field? I just had this experience. I loved getting to sit down with Dr. Julius Bailey Eugene Farlough-California Chair in African-American Christianity..

[Michael Morrell @Genuine_Michael]

Dear Creator [within, beyond, through and as]… all 14 billion years of cosmic space-time creativity…

As we [complete] Election Day, amidst the illuminating intensity of this full moon eclipse: