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.
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?
"What If… What if our religion was each other? If our practice was our life? If prayer was our words? What if the Temple was the Earth? If forests were our church? If holy water—the rivers, lakes and oceans? What if meditation was our relationships? If the Teacher was life? If wisdom was self-knowledge? If love was the center of our being?"
What if...where didn't matter? If how didn't matter? If we just were conscious, wide awake to the very ground of all being? If some how, each of us did it in deep sense of a spirit of truth? That this moment, this life, so fragile, beautiful and mindboggling wonderous...that we would cherish it, and nurture it with a profound sense of awe.
What if...the deepest journey is to wrestle with what it is to be abundantly human?
"The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things."
Franz Kafka
The human dilemma is that we want to personalize what ever it is that ignited the fuse to initiate this infinite creative explosion. The idea, that if we find it, we might reason with it finding ultimate answers to life. What if it is just energy, a force of somekind. What if we stretch our theological minds, extrapolate all the laws of physics backwards to the other side of the explosion and we are left with absolutely nothing, an infinite emptiness we can't relate to then what. Will we be better off? I think it is good to know our place in the vastness of the Cosmos, because I think it may come down to an incredibly profound act of mysteriously beautiful chance. Maybe to the theologian all looks scripted, to the physicist pure and precise laws, again what if it is an illusion, and, that it is a profound evolving mystery in which everything miraculously unexplainable have fallen and hold us in place. Maybe what we truly worship is the ultimate form of infinite mystery. It sounds weird, but I might be cool with that.
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.
trying to live faithfully...search, revealing, and building the Kingdom
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