hi everybody,

i just did a tarot reading to suss out the haps for a new online church i am considering initiating.

the site will be called xcollective.org (unfortunately, at present there's somebody already squatting on (or planning for) it a little. perhaps we have common cause. they have a nice logo.)
the tagline on the top of the front page will read:
"say hello to your new online church community.
check in weekly for new songs, new services, new missions, new fun."

it will begin with services composed of readings, songs and dog-walk sermons by me, and in time will include works from my friends, and eventually any members of the site with an egalitarian high-renown.

$10/month, applications for waivers accepted

the site will also have a forum available for peer-mentoring. this will be a new venture of peer ministry. i am hoping to have it user-moderated in some way akin to slashdot. somebody writes in and says "hey, i have a problem," or "hey, i need a clarification," or "hey, i want to start up a project." then others reply to them either with offers of advice, or of assistance. based on the questions and answers, certain readers (selected at random, upon login) will be able to vote responses up or down. then those whose responses are voted up (based on the awesomeness of their questions, answers, or projects) will earn a certain amount of renown (a measure of moral virtue and brilliance).

and the there will be a portion of the site that will help us to have enough economic fuel to energize the effort. it will read:
say hello to t-shirts, to soup kitchens, sweatshirts, knitted blue mittens, shorts, hats, jackets, solar power, carbon offsets, and more. paper clip triangles!! (that last one i will expand upon in another post/sermon.)


okay so at the top of this post is the tarot reading i did this evening, using the Tarot of Dreams deck and the Orphalese Tarot program, and a custom reading I designed myself. It has a lot of cards, but the reading's story-form fits together nicely (as does the story of this specific reading). I'll let the cards and the explanations in the boxes tell the story. the subject of the reading is the effort surrounding xcollective.org.


and then i had a little revelation, and a cause for hope and joy.

there is a problem that has been plaguing the world. we are beginning to identify it
and soon, by the grace of the one who set fire to the sun, we will vanquish it. the problem will either leave or die or be reformed into the solution.

this problem is the fallen state of humanity. how did we fall? we fell when we invented the possessive pronoun -- "mine," "yours," his," "hers," "ghers*, "its," even "ours." We fell when we applied it to stuff that we had no right to claim (resources outside our body, or our immediate needs, when we began to acquire and collect and accrue money and possessions, rather than them being owned collectively by the community or the earth). and we fell when we chose to value the first person pronoun more than the first-person plural pronoun ("I" is more important than "we").

this fallen state (the same such as st. paul mentions in romans 8) is our frustration, experienced by us as living within a futile system, rife with external impositions and exploitation dividing humans against humans, using tools such as malleable currency and usury/interest in an untethered growth market economy, corporations, media, adversarial individualism, adversarial nationalism, adversarial corporatism, manifest destiny, go-forth-and-conquer attitudes, slavery, sexism, racism, classism, prisons, and a system of law designed according to the values of the dominant groups within humanity. it hurts because we know the glory is coming and seek a way to co-create it, and yet the sentience on this planet is divided into more than one will. yet multiple adversarial will ought not be the case, as it's a waste of resources.

one day soon on this planet, we will have a growing and infectious community of universalist utilitarian egalitarians, with a strong distributive justice ethic. (comprised from among a group of xcollectivists, including: all sorts of christians, all sorts of muslims and sufis, jews, buddhists, hindus, jains, sikhs, humanists, daoists, confucianists, pagans, neopagans, zoroastrians, rastafarians, pastafarians, olympians, angels, children of god, children of the earth, and existentialists -- plus many more yet to be named. even dadaists and people dressed as unicorns. this community will have the will to create, sponsor, and steward a set of values that are in league with the needs of the previously-mentioned glory.

apocatastasis is soon to be upon us.

*gher is a gender-neutral possessive pronoun, pronounced with a soft g, like the j in "frere jacques, frere jacques, dor mez-vous."


Lyrics: "Sent by the one who set fire to the Sun!" from Parable of the Light

Colors: Rainbow above the magician's head on the 1 card.

Prayer: No bosses, only peer-mentors and students. Everyone owns their own energy.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

http://revjd.blogspot.com/

"Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence."
- Frank Zappa

"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers."
-James Baldwin