Patrik Olterman Rodhe's Blog, page 10

Precipice

Dreary darkness tightens around my heart. I feel the waves of lost emotion rolling in over the breakers, salty foam covering me.

The full moon peers down from her perch, closer than ever drawing the waters out from the depths.

It was a long time since I stood here on this precipice looking down into the turmoil. There are monsters there, or so I tell myself. Thorns and twisted thoughts writhing in the depths. What if I fall?

But then again, what if I never jump?

I used to avoid talking about sin, now I love it!

Sin and repentence are two Christian concepts that I used to have an issue with. I was taught that sin was both like a cancer in my soul and that sinner was my identity. I used to actually believe that when I sinned god would leave me and stay away from me and my life until I repented. I used to believe that the Devil wanted me to sin and was working fulltime himself plus that he had set some of his most trusted minions to create situations for me to fail in, to fall into sin. I felt helpless...

Differentiating the mature and immature feminine

Continuing this trek exploring the masculine and feminine the time has come to look at the immature and mature feminine. First a caveat: I am not a woman so while it is entirely possible for me to be in my immature or mature feminine it is not how I am wired. Robert Bly writes that there is a 3% difference between the physiology of male and female DNA. This may sound like very little (and in one sense it is) but at the same time the 3% difference is present in every cell of our bodies. Robert...

The divine feminine

In the tantric tradition everything hinges on the polarity between the divine masculine, awareness and consciousness and the divine feminine, energy and life force. Everywhere we look we see this polarity between the outward and inward movement, the tension between the two. This is reflected in the Taoist tradition and we see it in pagan religions too. But how does this come across in a Christian context?

It seems that the Christian faith has for millennia tried to hide or deny the divine fem...

The divine masculine

As I was contemplating the mature and immature masculine yesterday I realised that in our confusion (or perhaps in my confusion, I don’t know how universal this is) we have lost the divine masculine. I have always been under the impression that we had lost the divine feminine but I think maybe I have gotten it backwards.

Since we really have no concept of the mature masculine in the general consciousness but rather hold the immature masculine as the only masculine we have ended up with two di...

Differentiating the mature and immature masculine

Continuing the conversation about the mature and immature feminine and masculine. I will start looking at the masculine. In todays society we have a lot of the immature masculine going around. In fact there is a public caricature of what the masculine is that is solely based on the immature masculine and so for boys growing up there is no real image of what the mature masculine looks like. The idea that the immature and mature masculine is somehow only found in male bodied persons confuses th...

The masculine and feminine

In the wake on my post on feminism a conversation has started whether or not it is worth our time to even talk about masculine and feminine. Here in Sweden at least it’s a loaded topic. There is a large group of people claiming that the differences in masculine and feminine are simply social conditioning and has nothing to do with our actual biology while other still claim that there are fundamental differences between the male body and the female body and between the male brain and female br...

Feminism?

The other day I attended a beautiful concert at the Malmö Festival, being able to really enjoy the festival rather than work for the first time in 6 years. It was a nice show and the artist on stage had a very clear message of women liberation and empowerment.

What struck me is that as the artist was talking about woman plights and women rights, she did so in a very masculine way. It was nearly completely in the immature masculine mode of aggressively taking back and gaining the upper hand in...

Suppression or sublimation

According to the Enneagram there are three instinctual centers: Intellectual, emotional and instinctual or mind, heart, gut. In the same way we have many different bodies, a physical body, an emotional body and an energetic body. I could probably list more but lets stop there.

Let’s have a look at the heart and the emotional body. Our emotional body is where we access our feeling and emotions. The emotional body wants to feel everything deeply. Unfortunately in our society it is not entirely...

Being queer – The censored post

This post was originally posted in september 2012 and taken of the blog that same month as requested by the Salvation Army national leadership. I am now reposting it as it was an important step on the journey. This post in itself was an experiment in being open, authentic and vulnerable. The post pushed a lot of buttons and triggered a lot of emotion, I am guessing it will do so again. The fact that I was required to remove the post and that I am no longer employed by the Salvation Army prett...