You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2007.
Part I: Languages of belief
Part II: Survival faith and practice
Part III: “Someone should start laughing”
Languages of belief
As my spiritual life has matured and deepened over the decades, I have come to understand that no religious language, whether in scripture, in doctrine, in written or spoken ministry, or in personal testimony, describes the ultimate Reality in any objective way. Rather, at its best such language can only describe the human experience of interaction with that Reality.
This is not because the Real is unknowable, but because human language is limited. Even at its most articulate, the human brain is not able to abstract its intimate experience into concepts and symbols which are at once fully nuanced and also wholly unambiguous to others.
How can we share with each other our common experience of this one Reality, and yet allow that our individual relationships with it are idiosyncratic and, in their inmost core, inexpressible?
I point at the moon saying, “Don’t look at my finger.” Yet is the moon a round outer-space object reflecting sunlight, or a goddess, or the mirror of my emotions, or the clock of the tides, or…?
Part of my goal with The Empty Path is to become more articulately multilingual in describing to others my real faith and practice as it happens. Hence, I am very grateful to Zach A of The Seed Lifting Up for his gentle bravery in describing his process of moving away from belief in God and that movement’s interaction with his longing for real spiritual community. Though the belief crisis of my 20s was very different than Zach’s, I recognize kindred longings and seekings in what he describes —ones which persist for me to this day.
In this post and others which follow, I am borrowing Zach’s language to shine light on my own concerns and openings, not to debate with or try to persuade him or other readers. I apologize in advance if I misunderstand or misrepresent what Zach intends to communicate.
Zach has published a sequence of posts upon which I am drawing:
- “A post-Quaker vision of the Society of Friends” (March 27th)
- “Carrying the Society as long as you can” (August 26th)
- “The post-religious destiny of Quakerism” (September 2nd)
- “A note on being constructive” (September 2nd)
He describes two concerns which are interwoven throughout these posts.
The first has to do with a quest for belief “based on evidence” rather than on doctrine or superstition.
The second has to do with a desire to be part of a spiritual community which, to use the classic Quaker distinction, is centered in authentic practice rather than in outward profession of “right belief.”
I intend to address that first concern in a later post.
For now I am focused more on the tension Zach describes between two compelling internal forces related to that second concern.
One is a deep desire to be part of an intentional community of believers who are committed to serious, mutually supportive practice of their faith in the day-to-day world.
The other is a strong discomfort with the sort of unreflective “profession” of Christian orthodoxy which seems to assume agreement on the part of all listeners.
Both of these forces have been active in my own life, ever since I left Lutheran seminary during my first year there, back in 1973. I went to seminary fully invested in not just the profession but the practice of Christian life. However, I also went there while I was still deep in the closet as a gay man.
When I realized that personal and spiritual authenticity demanded I come out, I was confronted with what seemed an irresolvable conflict. The real presence of God, of Christ, in my inner life did not condemn but affirmed my orientation toward loving another man. Yet the orthodoxy of my church—and of most other religions—did condemn that core part of my personhood.
For a long time I was a refugee from the “christian” world, even though I had no doubt that Christ went along with me in my exile. I will write more of my own questing later, but here I want to generalize about exile and the seeking of refuge.
In his post “Behind the Hedge” back in April, Richard M of A Place to Stand expressed very well the dilemma now facing Quaker meetings—and, in fact, almost any religious group which opens its doors to spiritual refugees:
Being among people who share and affirm our values is uplifting. Time spent among Friends can be time to repair the damage done to our psyches by the world.
This is why some Christian Friends long for a purely Christian meeting. They would feel safer and more protected there. Hearing ministry spoken in their own Christian language sounds dearer to them. They feel especially wounded when someone within the meeting criticizes them for being Christian. They feel as exposed and attacked as they do in the world, here in the one place where they long to feel safe.
But there are many Friends who are refugees from abusive “Christian” churches for whom Christian language is threatening and not comforting. These Friends would feel safer and more protected if the word “Christ” were never spoken in their presence.
This is a problem in many meetings. Love and unity are hard to maintain among us when some Friends are hurt by neutral “Light” language and other Friends are hurt by ministry that explicitly speaks of Christ.
All the advice I can offer is for Friends to be brave. If someone’s language feels like a slap, turn the other cheek and try to respond lovingly to this Friend. Listen to them carefully for signs that Love speaks back through them.
Remember that others quite different from you are also looking for a place of love and shelter behind a hedge guarding them from a hostile world.
I came to Quakerism for refuge. I was drawn by the willingness of Friends to worship deeply together and to make authentic spiritual commitment to each other, without first requiring confession of “right doctrine.”
I began attending my first meeting in 1987, and I became a recorded member and then clerk in the early 1990s. My spouse Jim and I were married under the care of this meeting in 1994. Though we moved to another state seven years ago and attend another meeting, we still have our membership there.
What I remember of this meeting is its weightiness and diversity. In retrospect I know that the members range from Christocentric to Nontheist. They all seemed to be deeply involved in real witness in the social and political challenges of our community and nation, as well as in genuine caring for and ministry to each other.
Yet when Jim and I moved away in 2000, Friends were only just beginning to acknowledge in meeting that we needed to become able to talk with each other about what “Jesus” and “Christian faith and practice” might mean to each of us—whether or not “Christian” was our chosen language.
The meeting I attend now is smaller, more political, perhaps less ready to lift the cover of “Christian” language in order to talk about what inner, secret languages we each use. Again, the people are active and caring. Yet the awkwardness and uninformative silence are there.
So, at least until I stumbled into the Quaker blogosphere, I have been puzzling over my approach/avoidance reaction to “Christian” on my own.
Which leads me back to the question with which I titled this post….
(To be continued)
There’s a beautiful little piece in New Seeds of Contemplation which gratifies both my Christian roots and what Walhydra in her “About Me” paragraphs calls my “Pagan sensibility”:
A saint is capable of loving created things and enjoying the use of them and dealing with them in a perfectly simple, natural manner, making no formal references to God, drawing no attention to his own piety, and acting without any artificial rigidity at all.
His gentleness and his sweetness are not pressed through his pores by the crushing restraint of a spiritual strait-jacket. They come from his direct docility to the light of truth and to the will of God.
Hence a saint is capable of talking about the world without any explicit reference to God, in such a way that his statement gives greater glory to God and arouses a greater love of God than the observations of someone less holy, who has to strain himself to make an arbitrary connection between creatures and God through the medium of hackneyed analogies and metaphors that are so feeble that they make you think there is something the matter with religion. (26)
How delightful!
Blesséd Be.
Each year on my birthday, I look forward to reading the meditation for August 29th in Daily Word, the devotional magazine of Unity Church.
The message has always tended to be something I could welcome as a motto for the new year, something which affirmed my sense of self and reassured me that I was on the so-called “spiritual path.”
This year, however, I stumbled mentally. The day’s topic was “Pray for Others,” and the opening affirmation was:
I pray for you, knowing that God is blessing you now and always.
The scripture passage following the text of the meditation was this one:
In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” – Luke 3:11
My disappointment was so palpable that I almost put the meditation away without finishing it.
Then I recalled that I’ve had this reaction almost every time the Daily Word message has directed my attention to others, rather than to myself.
Journaling later that day at my favorite coffeehouse, I realized that this reaction shows me how much of what I call my daily “faith and practice” is really just about me. About sustaining and reassuring and comforting me.
I may voice more generous concerns and professions in blogs or conversations or worship. Yet the baseline of my day for several years now has been my own sense of loss, anger, distress, longing, loneliness, and so on. And, hence, my pleading that somehow or other I be able to find a daily “spiritual routine” which will give me relief.
As I wrote in “On waiting and squirming,” for most of a decade I have secretly been on guard against “caring too much” about people or being “in the path of obligation” to help them.
I am lost in this.
What I’ve just described is the unvarnished version of what Quakers call experiencing the Inner Light, rather than the New Age-y version. Simon St. Laurent recently shared a relevant passage from Fox in a post to his Light and Silence: Reflections on Quakerism:
The Lord doth show unto a man his thoughts, and discovereth all the secret workings in man. A man may be brought to see all his evil thoughts and running mind and vain imagination….
Sitting in the coffeehouse with this fresh self-awareness, I picked up my other, newer devotional reading, Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation, and read:
Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.
For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial “doubt.” This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious “faith” of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. This false “faith” which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our “religion” is subjected to inexorable questioning.
This torment is a kind of trial by fire in which we are compelled, by the very light of invisible truth which has reached us in the dark ray of contemplation, to examine, to doubt and finally to reject all the prejudices and conventions that we have hitherto accepted as if they were dogmas….
What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations!
The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with all the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply “is.” (13-14)
How bizarrely comforting it is to read this!
In the Buddhist metaphor, it describes that rare moment of letting all of one’s acquired significators for experience fall away.
In the Pagan metaphor, it is what I’ve experienced when the Crone—or Kali—says, “Nothing is sacred. No thing that you have seized upon to save you is sacred. Let it all go.”
Though I will not pretend that I am suddenly better at praying for others instead of only for myself, the light is shining on that wound within me. Perhaps, if I resist turning off that light….
Meanwhile, the last part of that chapter from Merton gives me another odd sort of comfort:
In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because “God is not a what,” not a “thing.”
That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no “what” that can be called God. There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”
He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am.”
And so it is.
Blesséd Be,
Michael
