Book Review: Adventures in Soulmaking (Part 2)

I've had a terrible time getting through this book. I'm only halfway through, not even finished with Part I.  A large part of my difficulty is the overtly Evangelical nature and tone of so much of the book, which I've already discussed in Part 1 of this review.  It pokes too many of my sore spots and makes me twitchy.

But another aspect of the book that is an obstacle for me is something I find in so many self-published books:  the inadequacy of the book design and the want of a dispassionate editor.  At first I thought I was struggling to read because I was furnished with a .pdf version of the book that didn't play nicely with my Kindle iPhone app.  Having to resize and scroll through each and every page was hugely distracting.  Some hundred pages into it, I found that I could read the published ebook version through Kindle Unlimited and promptly downloaded that to my phone.  Quite a bit easier to handle and a whole lot less strain on a nervous system always overwrought by hysterical illness.

The book still felt difficult to read.  I even started from the beginning again once I got the Kindle version and this time I started realizing that it wasn't all me; the book itself is just kinda clumsy. The story illustrations are too long and too fully formed as stories to be effective illustrations.  Caldwell states that his first desire in this book is to be a teller of stories.  If that were his only intention, he could have made a stronger book, something more along the lines of Women Who Run with the Wolves or Kitchen Table Wisdom. Caldwell clearly sees the value in good storytelling in its own right, he is married to a storyteller, but not being a storyteller himself, he confuses a good story with a good illustration.

Then there are the memoir and personal stories.  We follow not only Caldwell's trip around the spiral path but also Debbie, a spiritual direction client, who appears in each chapter in long passages of her own words that sound more like extended answers to an essay question than good narrative.  Debbie's story would be more effective if Caldwell has recapped her relevant experiences in his own voice and kept them much shorter.  Not only do we hear Caldwell and Debbie, though, there's also Duane and Donna, and several others I can't even remember who are brought in to tell us about specific points Caldwell wants to make.  In one complicated section we are treated to Caldwell, Debbie, Duane (or maybe someone else, I forget) and Tom, a patient of Caldwell's residency years, whose story we must enter both through Caldwell's own perspective and, awkwardly, from the perspective of his mother we are instructed to imagine we are,  despite his mother have zero relevance to the point.  Each of these people's stories are told in stop-action and abrupt shifting from story to story.  Added to the multiplicity of stories and the profusion of characters within each story,  the lack of decent formatting (no bold or underlining or other kind of visual marker to denote headlines or section titles) and sometimes no titles at all, I was constantly confused as to who was where, when, and why I should care.

I think Caldwell tried to include too much when he took on this project. All within the same book, he attempts to describe and promote spiritual direction to both those who are completely unfamiliar with the concept and those who already have some knowledge or experience, introduce Christian mysticism (without ever using that word) to readers who would probably be terrified to think they were being encouraged to mystical experience since Evangelicals are kinda neurotic about that sort of thing, describe the Jungian system of the person and make parallels to the Christian theology of the soul, and as if that weren't already more than enough, throws in Greek and German vocabulary with explanations and definitions. Is this a textbook for spiritual directors? a workbook for directees or solitary spiritual seekers? a collection of wisdom tales? a memoir? or three memoirs?

Keep in mind, I'm only not quite finished with Part I, the map of the soul or personality and description of the spiral path of mystics.  Part II is a whole nother beast altogether! Caldwell could have written three or four books instead of one and all of them would be stronger for their simplicity than this one with its excess.

Most of what Caldwell is trying to convey is fairly straightforward and could be conveyed easily and intelligently in a traditional linear outline. And Caldwell himself seems like a mostly left-brained sort of intellect for whom linear thinking is preferential. Yet he writes in this circling around from story to exposition, from the diagram of the soul to the description of mystical life, from too long quotes by  too many other writers to several pages of a meditation that not quite successfully analogizes the design of the Jewish SecondTemple with the architecture of the Christian soul.  Whether consciously or unconsciously, it seems as if he wants to present his material in a right-brained, metaphorical and symbolic outline, spiraling around from topic to topic and back, as if illustrating the spiral path of mysticism itself.  This approach might work well in small groups or one-on-one in mentorship, perhaps even in a classroom over a period of weeks, but it is less successful in book form.

A good editor and book designer could have taken all the separate pieces and given them a better home--perhaps in sidebars, chapter epilogues, and appendices--where they could shine more brightly on their own merit and not clutter up the linear outline that describes the anatomy of the soul and the roadmap of mysticism.  Caldwell has some really strong pieces, though many of them are too long and extraneously detailed, but they don't work as strongly together.  The whole here is not greater than the sum of its parts.

All of those complaints aside, I intend to keep reading.  Despite the weaknesses of the book, Caldwell does indeed know what he's talking about and knows it very well.  He has walked and is walking the walk and writes from his experiential knowledge as much as his intellectual and theoretical knowledge.  Most books I've read of this nature are from only one side of that equation--theory or experience--and are lesser for it.  Caldwell has deep wells of training in both theology and psychology and experience as both a contemplative and a counselor of spiritual adventurers from which to draw and I want to know what he can teach me.

Book Review: Adventures in Soulmaking (Part 1)

Despite the acres of books being sold in the category of Christian Living, the concept that one might benefit from anything other than solitary prayer and Bible reading in the making of the righteous Christian is bordering on sacrilege.  Reading the Bible for oneself is after all probably the single most significant tenet of being Protestant.  Finding it fully sufficient for salvation and sanctification, needing nothing else, is foundational to Protestantism and Evangelicals use that doctrine as the basis to denounce all kinds of spiritual practices from praying with beads or even praying memorized prayers, to meditation (except as they define it--conscious prayer and intellectual consideration of Scripture), to the lighting of candles or veneration of icons or saints or mandalas.

Although in practice Evangelicals often don't read their Bibles as often as they claim nor as completely or with the open-minded curiosity and willingness to question that marks the spiritual scholar, depending instead on the weekly exposition of the text by one's preacher and the writers of Bible study guides to interpret their religion to them, and though Evangelicals like spiritual mentoring lookalikes such as accountability partners or discipleship group leaders (both of which tend to focus more on behavioral changes in one's life that are supposed to demonstrate profound spiritual growth, but in my experience rarely do), actually entering into an intentional mentorship with a spiritual teacher or director for the purpose of open-ended spiritual development is rare.  It was unheard of when I was fully immersed in Evangelicalism a couple decades ago.

For this reason, Troy Caldwell's book on spiritual direction, written by an Evangelical for Evangelicals is a very significant mark of progress.  I heartily applaud Caldwell's desire to bring spiritual direction and other aspects of contemplative Christianity to Evangelicals, for whom it has long been anathema.  Educating Evangelicals in such a foreign concept and its long-ridiculed related practices is a huge undertaking.  Caldwell's heart for his mission is obvious and a credit to him and his work.

It is that same Evangelical flavor, however, that I consider to be the biggest flaw in this book.  Schooled both in Jungian psychology and Baptist theology and practicing both, Caldwell appears to have made his own peace with the inherent contradictions between the two.  I suspect he has done this by simply ignoring the Evangelical theology when it doesn't quite fit his Jungian perspective.  He clearly has embraced the broader theology of the greater Christianity beyond Evangelicalism (quoting from authors in Orthodox, Celtic, Anglican, Catholic, Medieval European Christian, and other non-Evangelical traditions).  In itself this embracing is no bad thing, as a Heretic myself indeed I commend him for it, but it makes his use of Evangelical language and theology awkward and jarring. His voice sounds much more authentic when he writes from his Jungian or contemplative traditional perspective.  His use of Evangelical language, cultural assumptions, or doctrinal stances stands out to me as being a bit forced--as if he really isn't much of the paternalistic, chauvinistic character that is quintessential contemporary Evangelicalism.

Fundamentally, Evangelical Christianity is a theology of renunciation and annihilation.  It is, or has become, a religion promoting simultaneously exceptionalism and shame culture. One is identified as a sinner worthy of death and is expected to own that identity.  Only in owning that shame and subsequently renouncing one's identity (to take on the identity of Christ, or to cover one's own shame in the blood of Christ as Caldwell's imagery in the temple meditation describes) can one become redeemed.  Upon redemption, however, one is immediately transformed into something far more exceptional than those evildoers still outside the righteous few. Furthermore, one is expected then to conform to culturally determined Christian behaviors or to experience further shaming, even to the experience of threatened or real excommunication in the form of social shunning, which is a psychological annihilation either in the shunning or in the renunciation of the self to become or remain one of the group.

In the same way that salvation or the renunciation of oneself, is the goal of Evangelical Christianity, the goal of Jungian psychology is individuation, becoming wholly oneself, through the integration of the opposing aspects of one's being.  Evangelicalism is all about identifying with the Good and renouncing the Evil; Jungian psychology is about integrating and transcending any such dualism.  In Jung's system there is nothing is wholly evil nor wholly good.  In fact, good and evil eventually cease to have absolute meaning because any aspect of the person or any belief or experience one has contains within it both good and evil, as well as the means for using both the good and the evil in any aspect as a tool for transcending the moment and becoming more fully whole and more fully the Self.

While there has been some excellent work showing the parallels between Jungian psychology and broader Christian theology, the more limited and dogmatically dualistic Evangelical theology is more difficult to synthesize successfully. I think Caldwell's attempts to do so fundamentally shortchange either Jung or Evangelicalism.  Admittedly, I am biased about Evangelicalism and find acknowledging its finer aspects all but impossible.  I try but my efforts are insubstantial against the weight of my prejudice.  Without doubt, that bias colors my reading of the parts of this book that are more overtly Evangelical. Almost certainly, an Evangelical reader of Caldwell's book would not notice or care about what I find so disconcerting--partly because they would be reading from within the Evangelical mindset and thus unlikely to be too critical about it, even more because they likely have little or no experience or exposure to depth psychology, mysticism, or contemplative Christianity. So to that target reader, the Evangelical layperson, study group leader, or counseling clergy, Adventures in Soulmaking is probably an excellent resource.

Longing for the One Who Denies Me

I have a question related to a comment you posted on [another blog]  I hope you don't mind.  You said:

"I grew up a third generation Christian. When new converts would come to our church or I'd help out my dad with his work with street people and addicts, I used to wish I hadn't grown up in a Christian home so that I could see God's grace as actually saving me from something. These people with their newly-converted zeal--which sometimes lasted for many years, at least as long as I knew them--had an experiential understanding of salvation that I could only glimpse intellectually. My Christianity was a mental exercise of theology--doctrinal statements, lists of rules, and worldviews--I longed for what those homeless drunks found in God. What had I been saved from after all? My big sins were arguing with my brother and having "an attitude" with my dad, and those certainly didn't go away with a conversion experience. I never saw that I had been "saved" from anything nor to something that was experientially different than my "former" life."

 I ask, have you ever found an answer for that longing and dissatisfaction?  I ask because that is my longing too.  I have been a Christian since I was 5ish.  I know I didn't fully understand it all at age five but I did have a heart for my parents God.  That faith matured until I though that he was my God too.  But that longing to truly have that fervor for the Lord, to be truly saved from and FOR something has never left me.  It ate at me thorough my childhood as I wrote stories and poems of a God who SAVES.

Now, I am tired of waiting for that salvation.  I long for the feelings of redemption but I fear that God has forever denied me this.  I grew up in a house allergic to Christian emotions and I am honestly about sick of Christianity.  I am sick of longing for something and loving the One who denies me it, then beating myself up for wanting it and telling myself to submit to an intellectual faith.

I know that you are a complete stranger, if this letter is just too personal I am sorry, please ignore it and know that in no way am I trying to be rude or to dump my problems on you.  I am simply approaching you because you wrote exactly what I was feeling and I hoped that perhaps you had found the answer.  Thank you for clarifying what had been simmering in my hear for a long time.

"I hoped that perhaps you had found the answer.”

I certainly haven’t found The Answer, but I have found An Answer, sometimes.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that I had to leave Christianity to find it.  In every flavor of Christianity that I experienced growing up—dozens of different denominations and teachers but all of the same basic fundamentalist Evangelical genre—God was always this distant, self-righteous, easily offended, jealous/possessive tyrant who used Jesus alternately (depending on the teacher) as bully-boy to enforce his Will or as whipping-boy on whom to take out his displeasure with me.  Of course, that was rarely the direct teaching I got, it was taught implicitly in “live right to please God”.  The cognitive dissonance between the explicit teaching of “for God so loved the World” and the implicit next phrase that he’d rather kill his own son than meet directly with humanity baffled me for years.

As a very young child, as I suspect most children do, I had some visceral understanding of unity with Love and Life and the indivisibility of Creator and Creation.  Over time (and through some traumatic experiences) that intrinsic awareness of Love Divine was co-opted into language of self-hatred and bigotry and performance.  Despite my best efforts to make sense of a god of love who has damned all people to eternal torment if they don’t live bounded restricted lives of martyred self-abnegation, which was called abundant life, I just couldn’t accept it.  Somehow, in that place where I knew things that my Evangelical worldview said couldn’t be known, I knew that God was more than some bipolar sky cop (as a commenter on my blog called him).  Somehow I knew that love and punishment could not be synonymous (though I still get that mixed up).  So in my mid-twenties, I began walking away from Christianity. 

It took me a good five years to completely leave the religion and begin living a thoroughly secular life.  Five years and the support of a contentedly skeptical agnostic husband whom I married during this period.  I tried to be an atheist, denying both the tyrannical god of Christianity and the Divine Love I had once known but I found myself drawn to people who had found other means to manifest their spirituality—Pagans, Witches, Buddhists, social justice and tree-hugging do-gooders—I just couldn’t leave the God Question alone.  Finally, in my mid-thirties, I found in yoga a place where I could quiet my brain and all its doctrinal doubts and declarations, where I could simply Be and let God meet me. 

In the quietness of meditation, my mental chatter finally shuts up, quits repeating to me all the noise of doctrinal “faith as intellectual exercise”, and lets God speak in silent fullness.  I developed a very ecumenical spirituality of Pagan earth-loving, Catholic saint-commemorating, Buddhist mindfulness, Hindu-originating yoga, and totally commercial Easter Bunny/Santa Claus rituals and family festivals.  I became a glutton of religious smorgasbord.  But it grew out of a healthy awareness that God was present in all these traditions in a way I hadn’t found him in Christianity.  But I kind of burnt out from all of it.  Largely, I suppose, because I still hadn’t let God be God—I hadn’t truly renounced the god of Christianity as I’d known him, I was just trying to drown him out with these other practices. 

Somewhere in the mix, I began reading the works of the mystics, mostly medieval, mostly Muslim/Sufi and Monastic Christian, and I was happily astonished to find that the God that they all wrote about having met was remarkably similar to the God I met in meditation.  Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Rumi, Hafiz, Meister Eckhart all seemed to know most intimately this same God of Love, of renewal, of creation, of compassion.  And they all were at odds with the conventional God of their religions.

It took developing a chronic hysterical illness in my mid-forties for me to begin re-examining Christianity from the perspectives I’d learned through my years as a heathen.  I realized that in rejecting Christianity so vehemently, I wasn’t embracing all traditions with tolerance and a willingness to learn, I had become an anti-Christian bigot.  Logically, I knew that Christianity couldn’t be any better or worse than any other religious tradition; they all have better and worse expressions. In order to become whole, I needed to exorcise the demons that still inhabited my soul, making me fearful, inspiring me to hatred.  I needed to find the God I knew within Christianity, as I’d found him in so many other places.  I’m still working on that.

So, yes, I have found a communion with the Divine that fulfills me and I find comfort in reading so many that have come before me who found that same communion.  But no, I have yet to find a community of fellow God-finders with whom to corporately commune. That is what I long for.  A group who comes together to meet God, each in our own way, perhaps, but together.  The internet has been marvelous for connecting me with people who seek the same God but often at great physical distance from me.

I don’t know if my experience will help you find God—or more realistically, help God find you—I hope so.  

A Counterfeit Spirit

As I have become more comfortable in my own heretical skin this last year, embracing all of who and what I am as wholly Holy, I had begun to doubt how seriously I would have been spiritually annihilated as a child if I had come out of the mystical closet.  I castigated myself for hiding in that closet for 40 years.  I reprimanded my self with “See?  It hasn’t been that bad coming out! What were you so afraid of?” 

Well, … this: http://solasisters.blogspot.com/2009/12/mysticism-counterfeit-holy-spirit.html

The writing of someone who had embraced everything that I have spent a lifetime struggling to integrate before she threw it away on a limited, exclusionary, superstitious Christianity.  Her words are echoes, resounding gongs, screeching nails on the blackboard of my memory, of the teachings I heard over and over in my childhood.  Everything I was trying to convince myself was overblown, childish hyperbole is right there calmly damning me from my computer screen.

Even the calmly logical, condescendingly simple explanations of how Satan takes over the mind and will of the unsuspecting mystic who uses prayer beads, walks a labyrinth, prays with imagination, or meets with a spiritual mentor sounds like the patronizing, self-righteous, religious know-it-alls of my childhood.   Did I risk a verbal, emotional, if not literally physical, stoning as a witch, a dupe of Satan, evil incarnate, if I had freely shared my psychic knowledge, my awareness of mystical union with God?

Hell, yes.

Reluctant Mystic

(driving to yet another lesson, practice, class, one of my children’s activities, someone made a comment about my hysterical illness, to which I made the following reply.  While I sat waiting for said kids to be done with their activities, I continued my rant to myself.)

I don't think you have any idea how much energy it takes to live in my body.

I drive around town with the AC on max. My right side is so cold that the bones in my shoulder and behind my ear ache but my left side is still red, rashy, and burnt from what sun and heat come through my tinted windows. The stark summer glare through my windshield gives me a migraine in about fifteen minutes. If I make more than three in-and-outs of my car (into a store, a meeting, an errand, the house) even using my special SPF clothing and a sun-umbrella, I will be queasy and I can't bear to be touched. Tomorrow my muscles will ache as if I'd worked out too hard. The hotter the weather, the quicker I reach my limit. Today was 115F/46C.

My good days feel like I had the flu last week; most days feel like I had the flu yesterday; bad days feel like I have the flu now.  Everyday I over-react to minor variations in heat and cold, drafts like the air conditioner exacerbate the over-reaction but being too hot makes me claustrophobic in my own body.

My ankles swell and feel like overstuffed sausages. The joints in my toes ache. My elbows feel like live electrical wires run through them. My knees crack and pop and feel like dull pins are stabbing from the inside out. Water burns my stomach but I am so thirsty. My face itches from the inside. My eyeballs feel like they are filled with heavy, too-dense jelly.

When I try to do just a little more, maybe pick up some dinner between picking up kids, I exhaust my body and my mind begins to suffer. I inadvertently cut people off in traffic. I miss my freeway exit or drive past my turn. I constantly have to check my calendar because I can't remember what the next stop in my day is—even though I've looked a dozen times already. I can't remember what is planned for tomorrow or if what we did was last week or the week before or last month. I forget between the car and the grocery store what it was I came to get, even if it was only one item.

When I'm tired, which is everyday from the moment I arise to the moment I pass out, I cry too easily. A commercial for allergy medicine chokes me up. A casual criticism from a self-absorbed teen or distracted husband can make me cry so hard I ought to pull out of traffic.

I read a book, listen to a lecture, watch a documentary and often can't put more than the main theme into words. I have a thought, draw some correlation between the new subject and something I've known but before I can pull up my phone or a notepad or my laptop, the connection fades leaving a weird twilight in my mind, a sense of brilliance remembered, the comfort of darkness unreached.

I have moments of clarity after I've crashed on my bed with my feet up and my head supported. I litter my friend's Facebook threads with wit and thought that I can't sustain in a blog post or even an email. I owe so many people responses but can't wrap my brain around what I wanted to tell them.

And then I feel guilty. Because I haven't cooked a meal in so long I don't know when it was. Because my house is overrun by small animals that spring to life from the accumulated dog hair, cat hair, and dust. Because I flinch when someone wants to hug me. Because I can be cogent occasionally for other people but pick fights and speak rudely to my family.

And I am angry that this is as good as I get. That it costs me hundreds of dollars a month in pills and drops and remedies to maintain more-or-less this state of unwellness but medical professionals look at my blood-work and say nothing is wrong, maybe a shrink? That people who agree that I'm unwell tell me it is my fault:

“Just suck it up, get on with things”

“Mind over matter”

“Have more willpower, just do it”

“Exercise more”

“Eat less”

“Follow this diet”

“Read less on the Internet”

“Take this curative I'm pushing”

“Quit thinking so hard, just let it go”

“If there weren't some payoff for you, you'd be well”

“Pray more, confess sin, give it to Jesus”

Okay. the last one hasn't been said to me personally but it has been the fix suggested in get-well articles I've read online.

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. Yet, we are not entitled to exuberance and vigor. Bigger, faster, louder, brighter is not our birthright. Sometimes abundant life is deep and still and quiet and slow. And often it hurts.  A lot. In our New-York-minute, fax-it-yesterday, multi-tasking, texting-while-driving culture, maybe this condition is my divine gift to remember the timeless, the wordless, the boundless. The weaker my body, the more incoherent my nervous system, the more surely I meet God.  My visions come easier. My healings are stronger. My assurance of divine reality is more certain.

So then, why do I continue to fight against this thorn in my flesh? God wrote this destiny into my Being. Why can't I embrace the gift without counting the cost?  Why do I listen to the chatter and static instead of God's holy descant in my soul?  I long to be one with the Presence yet I fight it with everything I have. Was there ever a more reluctant mystic than I?

Sent from my iPhone

I AM

I am, you anxious one.

Don't you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can't you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn't my longing ripened in you 
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am that  wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

--Rainer Maria Rilke
from For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics

Knowledge of Good and Evil

I dreamed of holocaust and genocide last night.  Recently, I’ve been staring again into my own personal Abyss.  I guess now I’ve moved to staring into the communal Abyss of all humanity.  Whence comes man’s inhumanity to man? That very phrase implies that the evil perpetrated person to person is something intrinsically not human. It seems, however, that the perpetration of evil is specifically a human quality.  

Animals, to my knowledge, to do not engineer genocide, although they may murder, bully, and rape in maintaining social order or in a battle for territory. Animals, according to current research, commit personal atrocities as a means to an end but only people commit large-scale, tribal atrocities as ends to themselves.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, while animals may act with individual altruism in order to benefit the group, only people show any willingness to martyr themselves for ideology (a fact exploited by those engineering atrocity). 

Both poles of the human dichotomy, atrocity and martyrdom, can result only from the same aspect of humanity that I think is the defining separation of man and animal: self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a sense of separateness from the rest of the world. 

There is no conclusive research on whether animals are self-conscious; certainly, they are aware of themselves—that my dog can be embarrassed when I talk about him is proof enough for me—but even animals that have been taught to sign do not refer to themselves in the first person.  They use the third person or call themselves by name. Human children commonly develop this sense around the third birthday, maybe a few months later.  They will start to use the word I to reference the self. 

Similarly, there seems to be no indication that animals have any sense of existentialism, that is, awareness that one day they will die (this is different than an end-of-life awareness of impending death).  Human children come to this awareness around age nine.  My elder daughter was 8½.  We were listening to the soundtrack to Ella Enchanted, and she was singing along.  She sang the first line of a song “every day, you die a little”, when abruptly she stopped singing, and ever so seriously informed me, “That’s true, you know.  Every day you live is one day sooner that you will die.”

I suspect that it is this existential self-consciousness that allows for both atrocity and ideological altruism.  To know that we are dying is terrifying, deeply and viscerally frightening to the human psyche. Life is a fragile and uncertain proposition.  Whether studied from the perspective of biology, chemistry, poetry, psychology, agriculture, philosophy, economics or religion, the deeper the subject is mined, the more clear the fragility and uncertainties.  It's all a crapshoot and then you die. That very knowledge demands that life become meaningful.  Why do we live, if only to die? We have a will to meaning—a drive innate within us to derive meaning from our lives (c.f. Viktor Frankl and the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy). If we cannot extract meaning and purpose from our lives, we will go insane.  

When the only certainty in life is death, uncertainty becomes the defining characteristic of Life.  Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is Pascal’s “God-shaped Vacuum” into which is sucked every possible kind of meaning: tribalism, hedonism, greed, hierarchy, lust, imperialism, socialism, altruism, theism—and all are present and active in every religion in the world.

So few of us have the courage to acknowledge death, to create meaning, to accept uncertainty. We would prefer instead to expend our enormous psychic energies on denying the one certainty we have by inventing elaborate theories and formulae to simulate certainty.  Even simpler is to accept the theories and formulae of people we deem more willing than we to have looked into the Abyss (though we rarely check this sort of credential in deciding the credibility of our experts). And even more common than anything else is the tendency to abuse substances, behaviors, religions or other people to deny even the fear we feel at the uncertainty of Life.

Anyone who has looked into the Abyss and come away (too often people venture willingly or unwillingly into the Abyss and, in their terror, they get stuck there—our modern religious, medical, and psychiatric professions are more likely to ensure the stuckness rather than facilitating a return) has one other certainty in Life.  That Love exists.  That Love matters. Whether called Love, God, Allah, Light, OM, Brahman, or All/Nothing, whether found through science, religion, mysticism, or poetry, this succoring, sublime, transcendent Ineffability suffuses the Universe, both physical and psychic.  And that Love trumps existentialism in aeternum.

Embracing Heresy

her·e·tic [ hérrətik ] (plural her·e·tics) Definition: 1. somebody who holds unorthodox religious belief: a holder or adherent of an opinion or belief that contradicts established religious teaching

2. somebody with unconventional beliefs: somebody whose opinions, beliefs, or theories in any field are considered by others in that field to be extremely unconventional or unorthodox

[14th century. Via French< Greek hairetikos "able to choose" < haireisthai "choose"]

[comment]  I guess that I'm confused about the heretic label you've bestowed upon yourself, for after reading most every post here, I don't think that I see anything heretical -- a very heavy word. … You seem to be professing that you don't really know what to profess -- so long as it’s genuine.

Ah, the short answer is that I am heretical because I choose not to accept any of the doctrinal dogma of Christianity as it is generally understood in our culture.

The longer answer goes like this: My understanding of the nature of spiritual reality is in direct opposition to the teachings about God and humanity and the relationship between the two that I learned growing up.  When I left Evangelicalism (the only version of True Christianity that I knew), I threw absolutely every belief I’d ever been taught into the recycle bin: there was not a single thing that I considered sacrosanct.  I even tried very hard to be an atheist but found that my mystical and psychic experiences made that philosophical position pretty laughable. 

After some twenty years as a non-Christian seeker of Wisdom, I realized a few very basic Truths that have now become my personal Fundamentals.  These are the mantras I’ve been chanting to my daughters since they were old enough to hear:

Treat people the way they want to be treated.

Share the Resources.

It's not funny if someone isn't laughing.

Charity begins at home.

Follow the money.

What goes around, comes around.

People are stupid everywhere; everyone is stupid sometimes; don't be any more stupid than you have to be.

Don't do anything that can get you pregnant until you are ready to welcome a baby, you're not ready for a baby until you pick out a good daddy. (Okay, this one may not be strictly philosophical but darn good advice!)

Here are a few more favorites that pepper the spontaneous sermonizing I do while about my daily business:

God is the creative force.

Hell is other people.

We are Imago Dei (humanity is the face of the divine)

If it is Truth, it is True across Time and Culture.

There are no Either/Or’s—they are always Both/And.

The opposite of a truth is a lie; the opposite of a profound Truth is another profound Truth.

The personal is always political.

Good leaders serve of their people.

Seek and ye shall find (and the flip side: you always find what you go looking for)

God gave us brains; he must expect us to use them.

The measure of holiness, regardless of religious culture, is characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control.

And the most profound truth of all:  Honor the divine, however you find it.  Nothing else matters.

As far as I can tell from my studies, none of my personal Fundamentals is contradicted by either Christian Scripture or the preponderance of nearly three millennia of theologians from any of the world’s Wisdom traditions.

As for the established Christian Fundamentals, I find very little evidence of truth to satisfy my rational mind. Mostly I found only parochial interpretations of tradition and scripture to support the dogma. So, I refuse to confess the creeds or to give intellectual assent to most, if any, of the central doctrines. When I first came back to Christianity, I even doubted the historical existence of Jesus himself.  Now I am willing to concede the likelihood of a historical Jesus of Nazareth, a radical iterant teacher who ran afoul of the Establishment and managed to get executed, but I still think a historical Jesus is irrelevant to the spiritual truth of Christianity.

I have not found convincing argument indicating the validity of anything like Biblical Inerrancy or even that the Gospel Truth is in any way historical truth.  Theological constructs such as the Virgin Birth, God in Three Persons or any other version of the Trinity, Deity of Christ (or in fact the deity of God), Original Sin, or even the historicity of the Resurrection or its physical necessity for spiritual redemption are, in my opinion, best understood from an allegorical point of view—as meditative tools or mythology that illustrates ineffable realities—rather than literal fact.

Being a true scientist, I am not arrogant enough to think that none of these doctrines could be absolute truth.  I am only saying that there is not, nor can there be, any way to prove one way or another what the literal truth of these doctrines might be.  And I choose to define the terms of spiritual reality differently, based on alternate interpretations of Scripture, current scientific thought in nearly every field of study, and my own experiences—all subject to change as I and all other scientists continue to ask questions, seek answers, and find more questions.

I have read extensively this last year on Christian theology, doctrine, church history, and my ever-favorite mystics.  I figured I was pretty well versed in the Evangelical dogma so I concentrated on specifically non-Evangelical sources—my favorites are listed in the Bibliography, Etc. page but that is only the tip of the reading iceberg.  I was more than a little dismayed to find how few writers I agreed with who were still identifying themselves as Christians and that none of those who did escaped rabid accusations of heresy. Then I realized that I was in the best company of all: Jesus himself was the first heretic in Christian history.  He was a Jewish heretic, to be sure, but heretical nonetheless.  If my claim to being Christian is that I follow the life and teaching of Jesus, heresy is a pretty good place to start!

Interestingly, while I was a heathen and espousing these ideas, no one much cared.  Non-Christians I knew took most of my conclusions for granted and Christians apparently considered me so far beyond the pale that I wasn’t worth arguing with.  But now that I have started to call myself a Christian again and I still hold to the same ideas, suddenly I get Hebrews (here and here) preached at me.  It didn’t seem to matter to anyone but me that I risked my immortal soul by not accepting the deity of Christ when I was a heathen but a heretic who questions the same is apparently destined to special damnation. As a heathen, I was generally well-respected; as a heretic, I am threatened with hellfire scare tactics by Christians and regarded akin to a first-grader who refuses to learn her ABC’s by non-Christians.

With all due respect to the commenter who wondered why I identify myself as a heretic, I call myself a heretic because I am heretical.  I put it right in the title so that no one reading my posts can be too surprised when I out some of my more outré ideas—truth in advertising, so to speak.  I don’t want anyone to have reason to feel betrayed when they discover that I don’t toe the party line.

The over-arching theme in this blog is that all of Christianity can be, and was by Jesus himself, reduced to a very simple premise: love God, love your neighbor, love your enemy. Nothing else matters.  Everything else is an add-on and a potential distraction from the Truth.  I don’t want my own heresy to be a similar point of distraction from that Truth.  In my own journey, owning my heresy has been crucial to understanding the radical simplicity of Jesus’ teaching, perhaps someone following my blog will find it equally liberating.