My House of Faith
I build my house on Unknowingness
The foundations do not stand up to scrutiny
The walls fold on examination
This carpet unravels with each footstep
The icons dissolve if I stare
These gods vanish when I greet them
And the light turns out, just when...
I think I've found the
Truth.
I build my home on Unknowingness
And now I am free to roam
According to anthropologists John Monaghan and Peter Just, "Many of the great world religions appear to have begun as revitalization movements of some sort, as the vision of a charismatic prophet fires the imaginations of people seeking a more comprehensive answer to their problems than they feel is provided by everyday beliefs. Charismatic individuals have emerged at many times and places in the world. It seems that the key to long-term success – and many movements come and go with little long-term effect – has relatively little to do with the prophets, who appear with surprising regularity, but more to do with the development of a group of supporters who are able to institutionalize the movement."
If the idea of being religious is intended to explain the meaning of life and/or to explain the origin of life or the Universe. You would think it would be a constant evolving journey of exploration in our changing perception of life, and the universe around us.
I think these prophets, these seers, visionaries filled with redemptive imagination that saw beyond the windows of the religions of their day would be filled with sadness that we have only followed their journey to the point of closing the windows again. To get to the place where you construct a sytsem of belief, rules, dogma, doctrine and rituals, is to end the journey of exploration. It is now nothing but maps, and road side markers...nothing more than a tour down memory lane. People eventual grow weary of the same road trip, where you arrive back home repeating the same story over and over again.
Ironically, it's kind of sad when we say," all the religions ", because in a sense we've gone astray, because really there is only one kind of religioness. Just as in science is one, the scientific approach is one, so is religion, so is the religious approach.
Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu they all belong to one kind of religioness. Of course they all speak different langauges...that is another matter. They are bound to speak different languages. Lao Tzu will speak chinese, Jesus will speak Aramaic, Buddha will speak in Pali and of course they will use the idiom of their day. But that is the difference of expression. And one should not be decieved by expressions, one should not be decieved by words, because religion has nothing to do with words. Maybe that's why Jesus didn't hire a scribe to record his every word. Maybe its because we've turned our words into the bricks of a fortified wall that we can not see. It covers our eyes, and hinders our insight. Religion at its deepest meaning is a wordless experience.
The problem with religion today is it creates theology. It's not really religion justa faint carbon copy of it. But, all churches are based on it. When a Buddha exists in the world, or a Mohammed, or a Krishna, or a Christ then pundits, scholars, and learned people, intellectually cleverand cunning people, gather together around them. They start working hard: "What does Jesus mean?" They start creating a theology, a creed, a dogma, a church. They are successful people because they are very logical people.They cannot give you God, they cannot give you truth, but they give you great organizations.
Truth is profoundly like beauty. Beauty is not matter and beauty doesn't belong to parts. Once you dissect a flower, once the wholeness of the flower is gone, beauty is also gone. beauty belongs to the whole, it is the grace that comes to the whole. It is more than the sum.
God is the greatest totality, "all things together." God is not a person. God is a presence, the presence when the total is functioning in great harmony...the trees and the birds and the earth and the stars and the moon and sun and the rivers and ocean...every speck of the universe. That togetherness is God. If you dissect you'll never find God. Dissect the world into who's who you won't find the presence that is God. To dissect religion into Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism or Hare Krishna you will not find God.
Maybe religion is the journey into the bigger whole, the totality of "all things together." It's only in this that maybe we find meaning.
That's where I'm at, this profound place where I can't really describe "God" in words. That's why God is beyond my imagination. God is the biggest conceivable whole, and without grasping and trying understand "all things together" we will not attain a higher understanding, and meaning. God is not a person, we have to move beyond that...the image of God looks like me, and not them. God is not sitting static somewhere at a cosmic postal code. Maybe, we come to the realization God is the total presence of existence, the being...as what John Shelby Spong likes to call the ground of all being.
And if there is an energy that holds "all things together", it is love. Maybe love is the purest possibility of God. Because it is the subtlest, and the most infinite force of unity in the universe.
The most profound religious experience is God is love. Profoundly, the deepest experience of love is a religious experience. And here's the irony, forget God, love will do. But never forget Love, because God alone won't do. If anything, this far along the corridor of history we can conclude just God isn't working.
Maybe the only hope for the future is embracing "all things together", in love...the purity of one religion beyond dissection, embracing the beauty of the whole. Beyond words, maybe this is the closest we get to the truth.
I can only really call myself a mystic. When I finally looked over my shoulder, and could no longer see any path at all...only my foot steps. I new I had arrived.
I was consumed by everything; everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will be. The utter mysterious profound freedom...consumed, accepted, deeply connected to everything...can only be described as "Love."
This whatever it is "God." Strangley, the shocking irony is in this place there is no "belief", and there is no "doubt." Here, I didn't have to struggle with which one to hold.
If any thing " doubt " for me was just a bridge. It's that chasm between the subjective and the objective. They are twp poles of the same reality. Ten or more years of inquiry, and questions, it kept me moving on an evolving adventure. And, it kept me moving.
If this, whatever it is, God-thing is love, in infinite bold letters "LOVE." It makes us look at our love, to find it filled with so many things. And in those "so many things", we find our love is polluted. Jealousy can't be apart of love. Hate, anger, possessiveness, can't be apart of love. Love knows no jealousy. Love knows no possessiveness; on the contrary, love gives freedom. If " Love " can't give absolute freedom...then, who is going to give it.
At that moment a revolution happens, an overwhelming sense of gratitude.You feel grateful for absolutely everything, every person...you even love your enemies. Love can't hate anything. Even if there is a scent of hate in the air, love ceases to exist.
So here I am, mystic, in this place of not believing, but not doubting, closer to childhood innocense...but, I guess you could call me a fool or crazy. If you were a christian, or someone witha religious slant, you might call it awe. But, it kind of makes me smile, burts into laughter, just looking at the miracle of existence all around me.
Here I am...therefore I am...once lost, now found.
Truth has to be lived, not known. Life has to be squeezed to the last drop to the last drop of juice. It is not something to be contemplated upon...drink it.
The last words of Jesus, the God-man to his disciples are profoundly significant. The last supper, the last time when Jesus ate with his disciples before being caught and taken to prison...He was aware that he was going to be caught; the rumor was all around. He was aware that it is possible he may be crucified. So after supper he spoke a few words to the disciples, " Perhaps I may not be ables to see you again. Just remember one thing: you have not been with me to listen to what I say, so that you may write them down later, misinterpreting me; You have been with me to eat me, to drink me, to live me. I may be gone, but you can continue to drink me.
It's that life that needs to be squeezed to the last drop...drink.
Once we have learned, and have known the secret of eating, and drinking and absorbing life like Jesus did, the whole of existence is open up to us. The master is only "a" small window into the universe. Once you come to the master, the window disappears and you are facing the whole existence.
The frame of the window should not become important. Sadly, we have made the "church", that window. That's what has happened to millions of people, the frame of window is being worshiped; nobody is looking through the window. No one is reimagining what is means to eat, drink and live in the context of broken world today.
The window is an invitation to see beyond the horizon of certainty, it's to grasp, to wrestle with crisis facing humanity today. But sadly, we stop at the window content with what we framed in our myopic theological thinking; we adorn it and worship it.
Someone is at the window worshiping Buddha, another window Alah, another window Krishna; but, the windows aren't for worshiping; they are to be transcended. They are to open our eyes, and minds to greater truths. Yes, we remember the windows that have led us to the view, but we move on to engage the future in this profound open space beyond windows in unity. This is where the reality of hope lies. If we are to recreate our world with a unified profound redemptive imagination it lies beyond our individual windows.
We can all agree that Jesus, the radical scandalous god-man was a resonator. He was profoundly tuned into the wavelengths of God and humanity, so much so, in him they seemed to be in unison. When we look at how he plugged into humanity it is obvious that the comfort of his audience was not a significant consideration. In fact, Jesus taught in a manner that engaged his listeners and challenged them. He had a way of taking them to a liminal space where he disorienated peoples religious beliefs, ideas about God, politics, power and wealth. Feeling their world fall out from under their feet, they grasp for the only thing available, Grace. Jesus was anything but crystal clear, simple, and easy to listen to. Even now, when we engage his teaching through the Gospels, it is a puzzle to which he never have all the pieces. To reduce it to certitude, rigid dogma and doctrine, to timeless creeds is to take the profound mysterious redemptive imagination of Jesus, and reduce it to "our" truths. Reading the gospels is like looking at a road map. We can second guess what the journey is like, but until we put our feet on the ground and navigate the broken landscape of humanity...the gospel is never experienced.
He doesn’t give us 3-point alliterated sermons, that you plug in and play to make your life better. He gives you a life, and death...a journey that boggles the human mind. He just says, "follow me", not to a church, a temple, a synogue or a mountain. He questions, but unlike the "bible answer man", he seems short on providing answers. He seems to enjoy watching us wrestle.
Profoundly, if any kind of truth can be found, it is that in this journey we discover the clearest revelation of what abundant humanity is.
I wonder how comfortable he would be at church on a Sunday morning?
Let’s not forget the Christian demand of discipleship: “Love your enemies.” Central to the Gospel announcement of Jesus is the nonviolent love of those who would oppose us: sometimes physically and other times ideologically. At the center of discipleship is love–love for God and for neighbors. And lest we forget the criteria for a “neighbor,” Jesus makes that clear in the story of the Good Samaritan: a neighbor is the person we naturally hate. For a Jew in the first century to even acknowledge a Samaritan as anything but a despised traitor to the God of Israel was unthinkable! Yet that is exactly what Jesus called his hearers to–to equate enemies to the status of neighbor. Therefore, a neighbor is any and every person on the face of this earth that we like, dislike, or would even consider an enemy. We are called to love our enemy-neighbors.
I've been on the margin of religion for some years now. In this self imposed exile, I'm misunderstood and usually avoided like an unpredictable crazy person. To strike up a conversation is like striking a match near a gas pump, it usually comes with a huge warning sign.
Here's my point, you may like your beautifully constructed theology, the creation script for life written before time eternal. The idea we as actors in this epic drama, we find our lines and play out our parts until the final curtain falls. It's not only the end of the play, but everything, the stage of life is destroyed in a catastrophic fire. And the only way to be saved, is to believe in the director/choreographer/producer's son and you'll be saved. Everyone else fueling the fire in some eternal furnace.
Yes, I believed in the script idea for awhile. Now, I'm kind of seeing everything as more improv, a drama that is evolving. It's the landscape of the stage in a state of constant change. It's reacting to the special effects. It's the idea if there is a choreographer/director we've not seen him. It's like profoundly, and suddenly it was scene one, and the curtain opened and we had to start acting...responding to everything going on the stage, the landscape of life. As quickly as it started, the director vanished, we had no script.
I deeply resonate with Jesus, the God-man, his humanly divine story in the gospels. I really believe if we lived out the redemptive imagination we see infused in the Jesus-life of the gospels we would see the dawn of a new creation, some profoundly more abundantly human, for all humanity.
But I don't believe in a personal deity, a god that "likes" some of humanity, and "dislikes" everyone else. I believe in some kind of entity on the otherside of the big bang, or the spark that ignited reality into being. Is it being, is it a force, is it energy, I don't know and I don't think it cares.
I don't believe any one sacred text contains the one wisdom for all humanity. I believe all sacred texts contain wisdom, but, not all of it. I believe both science, and philosophy offer wisdom to understanding reality, and understanding humanity's place in it.
I believe we as "humans" have a big role in this mysterious profound drama called "life." I don't believe the choreographer/director has a script in his hand with a plan to save us. Like I say, from the outset, from the opening curtain to this epic drama, as the drama has evolved, we have been given everything we need to change the play, change the future, or prolong it. The challenge is, whether we will be courageous enough to play our part.
Like I say I'm on the margins of religion, not an atheist, and not a religious believer...but I do believe.
I don't exactly know when my belief in the absurd story of Genesis finally evaporated from my mind, the mythical story of God digging his hands into the earth like an artist shaping and molding the human body. And when the artist finally pleased with his work, embraced it, breathing into its nostrils, humanity came to life.
It was beautiful to think of creation this way, so profoundly special, so about us. But, are we more freaks of nature, rather than the ultimate end to grand design.
Evolution is deeply disturbing. On the one hand, yes we are unique, but in the other, could our coming into being be more of an unraveling, a cascading series of profound accidents, a chain reaction of possibilities that sometimes "stick" together.
The Genesis story is certainly comforting. The artist who loves his work, the realtionship of molding, shaping and seeing it come to life before his eyes, a sort of self portrait made in "His" image. But, perhaps even more profound (scary) and extremely fragile is the reality of organic chemicals, atoms suddenly sticking together like glue in this primordial ocean. From there unfolds unicellular life, to multicellular life, to a rigid internal frame, to musculature, to neurons, to grey matter, the human brain.
This celestial ocean that our galaxy spins in is some four or five billion years old, and what we imagine as infinity stretches in all directions beyond that. Looking back over our shoulders this evolutionary man, the up-right walking " Homo erectus " is said to be fifty to one hundred thousand years old.
If one still clings to the idea of a cosmic creator, sitting in the factory of "existence," the assembly line slowly moving as he randomly sticks atoms, and molecules together; maybe it is more a story of Dementia (taken from Latin) originally meaning madness, from de- (without) + ment, the root of mens (mind) is a serious loss of cosmic cognitive ability in a previously unimpaired person (a God) who lost his mind and we are the outcome of the accident.
Back to the Genesis story. Was it really a conversation that just instantaneously started like someone flipping a switch and words flowed freely back and forth, or again was it something evolutionary?
The shock of self confidence came into existence and this awakening brought the knowledge we were distinct, and in some sense separate, outside the non-being of the rest of creation. Humans would never again identify themselves completely with the natural. The Genesis story reinforces the myth of a creation story being about us, and our maker when maybe against all odds the dice were rolled in our favour and humans found themselves on a evolutionary pathway of higher complexity.
With consciousness we experienced a greater sense of self which stood over against the world. We became conscious of the uncertainty and the shortness of life. We began to contemplate life. With the evolution of human consciousness a tremendous need was also born to find meaning, permanence and stability in a world suddenly meaningless, transitory and destabilized.
We can only imagine the first humans gazing into the infinite black depths of the night sky, the glittering surf rolling across this mysterious ocean. Try to imagine the shock, trauma, sense of aloneness and radical sense of insecurity that seized the human conscience. Now there was an awareness of danger being a chronic state of being. We were aware of our own mortality, and of the existence around us being so utterly vast we sensed ourselves as being insignificant.
The mind of humanity must have been gripped by angst and a fear of being squeezed to death. One thought must have oozed out constantly, "Who? Why? Is there anyone out there?"
There were no rockets, nor satellites to be launched. Primitive man howled at the moon. We screamed at the top of our lungs to anyone, anything, hoping for a response. We began to muse something beyond us, a maker, a creator. We mused what ever it was, it was as interested in us, as much as we were interested in it.
The relationship had begun, the evolution of God and the evolution of humanity.
Poetry, parables are acts of imagination that offer and purpose "alternative worlds" because they are open, door ways to infinite possibilities. Can imagination be indeed a legitimate way of knowing?
Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a profound insidious way, numbness robs us of our humanity, and makes us infinitely smaller. It is taking an eraser and removing the God-image in those who do not fit. Has our imagination been claimed by false lenses of perception and idolatrous theology that we protect and defend as absolute “truth?”
Are spiritual nomads, navigating a changing landscape and taking seriously, the shaping of their own field of perception and language of understanding? When we become so at home in a belief system, do we become oblivious to the points of contact in our neighborhoods, in culture, in technology, and art...do we drift and drown in an ocean of irrelevance?
The dominant partisan religious culture, now and in every time, is grossly uncritical, cannot tolerate serious and fundamental criticism, and will go to great lengths to stop it.
Jesus dismantled the religion of static triumphalism by exposing their gods and showing God was profoundly more mysterious than their “truth.” Jesus dismantles the religion of oppression and exploitation by countering it with the profound mysterious reality of “truth” being God’s infinite love.
When we leave our theology unexamined and unquestioned, we end up being slaves to it. When believe in our theology at what ever the cost...do we end up suffocating the redemptive imagination of Jesus?
William Blake called imagination, " the body of God ".
( Eve in the Garden of Eden )
The Garden of Love
I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.
Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And 'Thou shalt not,' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
There is no rituals, no doctrine, no theology...just one command, " Don't eat of the tree of knowledge." They are tempted...and they eat. This is what Augustine mused as the " orginal sin." I wonder if we still aren't sinning then?
The Old Testament seems nothing more than humanity's wreckless pursuit of religion. We delude ourselves in thinking religion was God's idea. We wanted laws, rules and commandments to keep...and when we failed we wanted ammendments to the laws. This was so far from the intimacy in the garden of Eden. But we were hoplessly hooked...it was always just one more chance and we'll get it right. We never did...and we never will.
As many times as I have read the gospels...I never come away with an image of a religious Jesus. I come away with my imagination ignited of a God who doesn't occupy a church, but a God who walks in the midst of his creation...as a friend. There are no barriers, no rituals, no confession of beliefs are needed to abide with this profound mysyerious God, who Jesus called, " Love."
I wonder if Jesus in the profound mysterious redemptive imagination he lived and spoke...if he didn't envision a new creation like the Garden of Eden...where it wasn't so much religion, but more life. Or as William Blake called it, " the body or God...and the existence of humanity ", as one...God again walking in the midst of his creation. Man and God, walking and talking as friends.I wonder?
( Hopefully after reading my musing...you'll get the imagination in my food art )
Yesterday I had this thought in my mind tumbling around like laundry stuck in the spin cycle. I just couldn't seem to open the door and get it out. It was this thought ; the " fatality " of truth. It 's truth that is in the quality or state of causing death or destruction, or truth that is in the condition of being destined for disaster.
A lot of so called religious truth is like that, truth that has been carved out in stone, that has become indelible that we some how determine is eternal. Or we are inspired by spirituality, or by some infinite consciousness to write what we determine is code for the OS of life. Our religious tribe determines it as the truth for "all" to obey. We use it as a weapon to confront others, and the deepest concern, we use it to construct an illusion of our own little world.
If anything, this kind of truth is lifeless. And this is the truth that Jesus seems to confront so often in the Gospels. So often we see Jesus in a heated conversation with the religious folk of his day saying, "You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies!"
It is Jesus confronting the " fatality " of religious truth.
We keep forgetting above all that Jesus was the profound revelation of God...but he was also the deepest mysterious revelation of what it is to be abundantly human. He took the religious truth in the context of his culture, society and in the corridor of human history challenged it with his "living" truth.
Left to their own devices and passions, religious folk have a hard time seeing beyond their fences into the world. While the issue of slavery and its grotesque inhumanity seem obvious to us now, it was not so obvious to slave owners then who argued—from scripture, no less—that slavery was a part of God’s plan. . Rather than being “fatal " to religious truth, it seems to me that these changes have argued for a more true following of Jesus' "living" truth for us than past understandings of the faith have allowed. Faith is a dynamic and ever-changing process, not some fixed body of truth that exists outside our world and our understanding. The "fatality" of religious truth may seem to be fixed and unchanging, but our comprehension of that truth will always be challenged in the midst of an ever changing human landscape. Over time, hopefully, we will continue to wrestle with the "fatality" of religious truth.
We must learn to read between the lines of religious truth, maybe the empty space between lines is pause to reflect to wrestle deeply with its understanding in the midst of our cultural diversity, our pluralistic landscape...and in the footsteps of where we are down the corridor of history.
Probably the most deadly and destructive "fatal" truth of our day continues to be...that Jesus doesn't accept the LGBT community. The "fatality" or religious truth may seem support that. I would challenge that assumption with the profound redemptive imagination of Jesus' "living" truth. I think Jesus would challenge any truth that marginalizes, isolates...and destroys the human experience of any life. I imagine Jesus in our midst today, in the midst of our stone throwing, our dehumanizing assault, saying, " You have heard what the law says, but, this is what I say..."
Jesus has given us the example of what it is to be profoundly human by confronting the "fatality" of religious truth...with "living" truth...life giving truth as he lived.
And Ironically having coffee this evening, I'm reading Acts 15...it's what I'm sure was a chaotic angry debate in Jerusalem. It was the decision to let the Gentiles ( the people that still had that wobbly bit on their weenies ) become Christians. You talk about the " fatality " of religious truth...as long as folks could remember God only accepted people who had been "nipped." I can only imagine how wild this scene must have been. And then, out of the conversation Peter says something profound, bringing a hush over the crowd...
"And God, who can’t be fooled by any pretense on our part but always knows a person’s thoughts, gave them the Holy Spirit exactly as he gave him to us. He treated the outsiders exactly as he treated us, beginning at the very center of who they were and working from that center outward, cleaning up their lives as they trusted and believed him."“So why are you now trying to out-god God, loading these believers down with rules that crushed our ancestors and crushed us, too?"
Absolutely, stunning redemptive imagination...the "living" truth of Jesus transforming the "fatality" of religious truth.
Who says the LGBT community can't have the Spirit of God? Who says they can't live their lives as Jesus did? But, the most important, why are we so intent on trying to "out-god God"?
We can continue to grasp the "fatality" of our religious truths...the weather beaten etched in stone truth, the " wobbly bits ' of truth and continue dehumanize people made in God's image...and reduce the abundant life of humanity to a mere trickle. Or we can redeem life profoundly with Jesus living truth by say, " the law, our theology says, our doctrines say...but this is what we say."
trying to live faithfully...search, revealing, and building the Kingdom
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