Patrik Olterman Rodhe's Blog, page 16

Autocorrected

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The text was supposed to read: I Love you! But in It’s infinite wisdom my smart phone decided to autocorrect it to: I live you!

At first it frustrated me, it happened over and over again in all kinds of texts, updates, blog posts, the word love corrected to live. And then the point began to sink in. To love is to truly live. It is only when we love that we acknowledge the connection between each other, and the infinite connection with god.

But it goes deeper still,...

What did you expect?

I have been a Christian on and off since I was 14 years old. I have prayed thousands upon thousands of prayers. Some deep and heartfelt, some pleading, some angry and demanding answers and some, I must confess, simply by routine.

I think that is why I stopped saying grace (praying, giving thanks for my food before I eat). Simply because it was a routine thing I did with no real thought, connection or even sincerity. I mean, we are hungry, we want to eat, our minds are not in that spiritual pla...

Why are we so afraid?

Those of you who have heard me teach have probably heard me say that joy is the Christian trademark, well that and or grace. While there are a lot of really awesome teaching in most of the world religions, the idea of grace, the completely undeserved, unconditional gift that inspires a no holds barred kind of joy in the believers life.That said, I have to ask, Why are we so afraid?

When I hear Christians speak both amongst themselves and from the pulpit. We are afraid, afraid of other religion...

Peace is not a circumstance

Most people have had this thought, I know I have, If I could just find some peace and quiet, then I could sort out my issues and get on with it. Most people wait for the circumstances to be right, or work frantically to make the circumstances right to achieve peace.

This need for quiet and rest is a deep human need, we must have peace so that we can hear the soft inner whisper of divine love. But what if we just got it all backwards?

Could it be that we have peace, that the place of our soul, o...

Love is not a theory

We talk about love a lot, we say that: God is love! The scriptures say it over and over again, they even say that unless you are in love, saturated with love, bubbling over with love, you are not with god. And so we realise that love is necessary, it’s a fundamental part of our Christian faith and lives.

But among all this love talk, how much and how deeply do we actually love? Again in church we teach that love is a verb, love is action, love is giving to those in need. I agree with all of th...

Kiss me, I am a Christian!

So I was looking at one of my favourite geeky webpages when I found this T-Shirt that said: “Kiss me I’m elvish”. Which of course is a rip of of the old “Kiss me I’m Irish” slogan. And it got me thinking…

Today Christians are so afraid of any physical contact, because we have fallen into the gnostic trap of the body and it’s desires are evil and the spirit and things spiritual (that is not material) that come from god are good. But it was not always so. over and over again the apostles, Paul i...

Sinner is not our identity

I have heard it often spoken in churches, you are a sinner! We most often base this on a handful of verses out of scripture like the famous “For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of god”. And so we fall into the trap where we think that we are what we do, that our identity is our personality or our ego is who we are.

It is commonly agreed (among Christians and theologians) that out of the over twenty different words used for sin in the New Testament the most often used is hamartia m...

Our humanity is not the enemy

It’s been around for a long time, the notion that the problem we have as humans is that we are in fact human. We call it the human condition. And so we aspire to be more than human, to be ‘spiritual’, to somehow leave our human existence and become something else.

The problem is that when we do this, when we treat our bodies and minds as the enemy we don’t become more than humans, we don’t even become better humans, in fact we become something less than human. The early church fathers wrote th...

Women are not inferior

The title should be enough, that should be the end of discussion. However, since we are prone to get stuck in patterns based on fragmented readings of scripture we have to go deeper than just this statement. We have gotten stuck on a handful of bible verses about submission and male dominance instead of letting the grand narrative and the foundational truths of the sacred text and of course the divine voice of unconditional love set us straight.

Let´s start from the beginning….

In the beginnin...

Conspiracy theory

I posted a short update to Facebook a few days ago that was accused of being to new agey. Why? Because instead of thanking god for what is happening in my life right now I said: isn’t it great when the universe conspires to give you your deepest desire.

Have I started worshipping the universe?

Of course not!

I also do not subscribe to the dualistic view that every good thing that happens to me is given by god and every bad thing is the devils fault. Because frankly I don’t believe that the conce...