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Father Len reveals how and why God uses loving trickery to expose truth and help us understand and live our purpose.
Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom
- Father Len explores the common theme in the religious mythologies presented in Joseph Campbell’s “Power of Myth” that first got him thinking about God as a trickster back when he was in junior high school.
- The trickster in every religious mythology is a rebel who is creative and helps humanity in unexpected, backwards and upside down ways.
- The theme of the trickster God, the God who turns things upside down, is also present in the Bible.
- Father Len shares the story of Moses, the coward with a stuttering problem who becomes the greatest prophet in the Old Testament to illustrate God’s unexpected, upside down, and backwards ways.
- The Bible tells us God’s ways and wisdom don’t necessarily follow straight lines or human logic with lines like: “Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard what God has in store for us.”
- Father Len shares his theory on why God loves to play the trickster.
- The mystery of God means we can never truly understand the infinite. The God of infinite love and infinite possibilities.
- Truth can be very tricky.
- Father Len shares a Native American religious myth to illustrate why God sends us tricksters in life.
- When God created the world, he gave every single creature a gift that must be shared for creation to work properly.
- We crave clarity. We demand things be either horizontal or vertical, hot or cold, black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. But, God provides ambiguity and less clear lines that must be fully explored with an open mind to be understood.
- God is willing to forgive what we consider unforgivable.
- Father Len uses stories about the “Feast of Fools” and the “Feast of the Ass” to illustrate the value of tricksters in religion and life.
- We need tricksters and fools to keep us from getting trapped in our orthodoxy and thinking we have the answer to everything in life.
- There is real danger in orthodoxy that boxes God into simple neat little answers.
- The heart of any civilization is its spirituality.
- God sends us people like Francis, Dorothy Day, and Catherine Doherty who seem foolish and silly at first, but in actuality they are tricksters sent by God to expose truth.
- Tricksters have this sacred role to help us laugh at ourselves, see the world from different perspectives and expose hypocrisy and foolishness and our spiritual rigor mortis.
- Christ is the ultimate trickster and holy fool. He does everything in unexpected ways. He destroys our enemies by making them our brothers and sisters. That’s a great trick. He destroys death by welcoming death. That’s unexpected.
- God is the trickster who’s always overturning our ways.
- Habits have a way of deadening the impressions from our experiences, causing even the holiest of things to become superficial or lost.
- When things happen in our lives appear to be silly or foolish, could it be the trickster God trying to help us see what is real and true?