Patrik Olterman Rodhe's Blog, page 6

The sacred paths of relationships

There are so many paths one can take in life and everyone must choose their own path. There are career paths, spiritual paths and relationship paths. Personally I think that all paths are valid, however I think it is important that each path is chosen carefully and intentionally. One of the many reasons that I openly share and write about the life choices that I have made especially in the area of relationships is that, especially in Sweden, many people do not know or believe that there is m...

We are writing history!

This year has been a fantastic year, a year of change, a year of honesty and integrity, a year of new directions. But all of these thing are in the past what is exciting about this new years is what is coming! As I was talking to my beloved last night I realised that while we have gone through some major shedding of layers and layers of religion and societal norms we have not gone far enough.

I am not taking the space I need to take personally and we have been far to careful, polite and PC in...

Why celebrate Christmas?

Today I was challenged, why do I celebrate this commercial holiday and pass it on to my children. What could possibly merit the perpetuation of this madness?

I do, in fact have an issue with the entire Christmas hype. The manic shopping the gruelling pressure to get presents right and to pretend that everything is alright within the family to uphold some ideal of tranquility, balance and peace.

This is why I want to reframe the entire tradition. Christmas is first and foremost a celebration o...

Oh my goddess! (or radical monotheism)

There are some people out there that have been disturbed by the fact that I am talking about the goddess and assume by that that I have left the Christian path. Because let’s face it while we as Christian give lip-service to the fact that god may not be a “he” and perhaps even can allow for god to also have an aspect of “she,” we have, as a tribe, an aversion of any mention of the goddess.

So let me put this straight and be done with it!

I BELIEVE IN RADICAL MONOTHEISM

What is radical monothe...

Letting our place of shame become our power

This weeks teaching on earth, birth, blood and sexuality we talked a lot about the blood mysteries within the Christian tradition. It interesting to note that while the early tradition has no such qualms the priestly tradition has a real issue with bodily fluids in general and bleeding women in particular.

A bleeding woman was cut off from the tribe during her moon period and sent outside the community into a tent. This was a place of shame and separation if only for a short time, after her m...

Earth, birth, blood and sexuality

It is that time of year when we celebrate the birth of Jesus. Or at least that is the excuse we have to go all nuts with lights, chocolate, food and presents. In many ways Christmas has become the holiday of commercialism … which in one way is fitting as money is earth energy.

But what if we where to look under the hood of the tradition and see what actually is there. What if anything can we hold on to, what serves us at this point in time.

Return to the earth

So we need to return to the basi...

What do we teach the children?

Patricia, Hanna and Anja watching Mio, Angelina and Guy do a dance performance in our living room.

Being poly is no picnic as there are no written scripts or handbooks in how to actually live it (sure there are some good books out there, but they all state the same thing, we make it up as we go along).

But one of our trickiest dilemmas have been: what do we teach the children?

Early on we decided not to sit down and have “The talk” with them. We also decided, as this journey for us has been a...

Freedom

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1 (NRSV)

It is a pertinent question, why did god give us freedom? Why where we burdened with choice? Hindsight being 20/20 it seems that it was a mistake to allow the human race the choice, the duality. However Paul makes it clear… It was for freedom that we where made free. The context here is religion. Paul is saying that we where set free not so we could go from the highly...

Spirituality, Sexuality, Social justice

This is the teaching shared at the first MCC heart gathering in Malmö on the 6th of December 2015.

The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), also known as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), is an international Protestant Christian denomination. There are 222 member congregations in 37 countries, and the Fellowship has a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families and communities

WE are starting a spiritual community here that will be,...

Did I go to far?

After more than half a decade of deconstruction I face this question. It all started with deconstructing our worldview and how we view god. Moving on to deconstruct our traditions and our ways of being Christian. This is not weird and is done all the time. In progressive circles the hermeneutics of different Christian tribes are constantly being deconstructed and questioned. In the radical Christian tradition (Pete Rollins, John
Caputo, Kester Brewin et al.) one is even entertaining the thou...