I continue to go through the inventory of gifts left me, for good or ill, by the Christian tradition that birthed me. I have no desire to leave that tradition–I love it–but I am exceptionally relieved to know that I have the freedom to jettison whatever I do not find helpful, and retain, in original or altered shape, only the elements that I do find helpful. To some who feel a deep allegiance to this tradition, this project must appear to typify the self-centered, narcissistic, relativistic attitude that is charged to all recent generations of Westerners. For me, however–as for many other people who have had to endure much harsher judgments than I have–this project is a necessary follow-up to my escape from spiritual abuse perpetrated in the name of Christianity.
I am fortunate to find myself, two or three years after breaking free from a semi-cult run by my own in-laws, already deep within the restorative stages of recovery. I have even reclaimed for myself some Christian words that were tainted by association with that abuse–words like “faith” and “grace”. I have voluntarily parted with the idea that the Bible has a spiritual authority in itself, a move that would mark me to many Christians as one who has betrayed and left the tradition completely. To many of them, it would not matter that I retain a reverence for the books of Scripture as unutterably precious. I have inherited enough of an iconoclastic strain from my own mother that I probably do not care enough for what such people think. Yet, for a long time, I cared very much what my mother-in-law and her family thought of me, and it was the severance of those ties that both determined me never again to let anyone use the Bible against me as a weapon of authority, and made me feel free to finally cease from any worry about being “biblical”.
As I ponder the wisdom of other traditions, such as the Sufi tradition in Islam, my reasons for wishing to continue to identify with the Christian tradition are becoming clearer to me. Even the cross–an idea especially tainted for me by its associations with the abusive demands of the “leader” to let her (allegedly God) break my will–has begun to have living, personal meaning to me again. I continue to grow into an understanding of human selfhood that encompasses both the need for austerity (self-discipline, “the cross”) and mercy (acceptance, non-judgment) in our dealings with ourselves.
For me, this grows out of the key insight gained from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death that what we need is not a dead self, but a grounded self. The means of that “intentional grounding” is now becoming clearer to me. The part of it that had been hard for me to see, because of my Protestant heritage, is that the living union between our deepest self and God does not exist only by “faith”. It has always existed, and never stopped existing even at the times that I judged myself most distant from God and most under the rule of sin. God never cast me out–has never cast anyone out. He has always held me close to him–and certainly not because I was part of some limited company of the “elect”, or participated in some form of covenantal mercy. Separation from God is certainly a real experience, but it is the experience of being lost in an illusion. My task is not to reforge the union, but to awake from the illusion of separation.
This still sounds Eastern to me, and not specifically Christian, even though I have been an intellectually convinced universalist for over twenty years. I have come to the point, however, where it is an essential understanding for me. Strangely, as I make this further step away from the form of Christianity that I received, the words of Paul the Apostle begin to regain meaning for me: it is, indeed, a whole new world when we experience being “in Christ”.
It should not surprise me that God has never felt the need to reject us or send us away from himself. If we analyze our own feelings closely, it is clear that our impulses to reject and condemn other people spring from fear–fear that our love is not strong enough to take the brunt of other people’s behavior and still believe in their essential goodness. However, God knows nothing of fear or lack. The cross was a demonstration of his willingness to bear the suffering caused by our behavior without retaliation–but it was a demonstration for our sakes, not for his. As George MacDonald perceptively observes, the Father has been suffering for us from the beginning until today.
Still, I am so well trained in Christianity that it is hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that sin does not separate us from God, and never has–on his end. Part of this is a matter of language, of course. There is a valid sense in which you could define sin as precisely whatever separates us from God. What I am coming to see is that this separation–real enough in its effects–is imposed by ourselves upon ourselves, and remains an illusion, no matter how deeply we go into it. This does not mean that evil does not exist, except in the sense that Christianity has always maintained that evil does not exist: only God’s being, which is self-existent goodness, has essential reality.
I have lived under strong condemnation since my teenage years for not being able to love other people, even and especially the people closest to me, according to the Christian moral standard of love. I am coming to see that this sense of lack is also a part of the world of maya. It is simply not true that I don’t love other people, or that I don’t have enough love to meet the daily demands of their interactions with me. I still fall to the temptation to judge, condemn, and reject them–again and again–and this, rightly, still makes me feel terrible. What I am learning is to use this legitimate feeling of sorrow over hurting others to remind me to apply the same mercy to myself and to them. Just as the union between God and myself has never truly been broken, neither has the union between myself and all the other creatures of God’s heart. It is merely waiting for me to come back out of my world of illusion, in which I wander in a maze of hurt and fear, and recognize its calm abundance again. Dwelling within this abundance naturally makes me able to make atonement to those I have wronged.
This recognition could be properly termed “faith”. This is, of course, another matter of language. In this sense, faith is indeed the crucial link between ourselves and the newness of life that always awaits us. Here we come very close to the traditional language of Christianity. Faith is a reception, a welcoming, and therefore, it can be properly said, by definition, that we can receive nothing without faith: that is to say, we can receive nothing without receiving it. And, yes, this recognition, this receptiveness, often runs counter to the turmoil that we are feeling in the moment–and, in this sense, we live “by faith and not by sight”.
I suppose this is part of what I mean when I say that the language of Paul is becoming meaningful to me again. But there is another major item in the inventory of Western Protestant Christianity (WPC) that I am in the process of throwing out. That is the notion, as it is commonly developed, of vocation, of calling, of “God’s purpose for your life.” You could say here that I am throwing out a spurious, foreign growth on WPC in favor of a deeper, saner historical Christian understanding. You could also say that the particular “flavor” of WPC, its characteristic beliefs, naturally breeds this abuse of the idea of vocation.
I grew up with the deeply ingrained idea that God had big things for me to do in the world, and that my purpose in life was to do them, or at least to become the kind of person who could do them. I think that in this I have only been like many other enthusiastic and committed Christians. I also do not doubt that the initial proposition, “God has big things for me to do in the world,” is harmless in and of itself. It may be true. The problem is the almost irresistible temptation for me to see those “things” as the goal. The moment that I yield to this, God becomes instrumental, a means to an end. This is just as true if my goal is to become a certain kind of person.
The deeper historical Christian tradition understands that God can never be a means to an end. For each of us, he must be the End–or nothing at all. The writers of the Shorter Catechism had it right when they identified the chief end of man as “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” In other words, my purpose in life, your purpose in life, is simply to belong to God, to be his delight, to allow him to take pleasure in you, to take pleasure in him. This is still startling to me, although it is indubitably orthodox Christian doctrine (for what that is worth). It is also good Sufi doctrine, and good Brahmo doctrine (the flavor of Hinduism espoused by the great mystic poet Rabindranath Tagore), and good doctrine in several other traditions as well.
Here is where I feel the necessity for austerity comes in. The great Western monotheistic traditions view any deviation from this principle as “idolatry”, the worship of a false, alien, dead god. It shouldn’t surprise us that WPC is full of idolatry in this sense. This is freely admitted and pointed out by numerous thinkers within the tradition itself. What may go less recognized is how the characteristic beliefs of WPC encourage us to see our spiritual growth, or “holy living”, or the “Spirit-filled life”, or “bearing fruit”, or “fulfilling God’s purpose for our lives” as the goal. For myself, I have distilled the needed reminder down to, “Seek the Fructifier (the one who makes fruitful), not the fruit.” That helps me. But, it should be added, don’t seek the Fructifier for the sake of the fruit. That is still instrumental thinking.
This is still hard for me. It is a daily discipline to refocus my energies and priorities. It is a daily death, my experience of the cross. I’m using traditional language here, but I have to be careful. I’ve struggled with this tension for almost thirty years now, since my spiritual awakening the summer I turned fourteen. I’ve made myself very sick, mentally and emotionally, by wallowing in the guilt of “idolatry”. The goal is not to crucify myself, or to stifle or squash my own desires. That must be made clear. Self is not the problem, and the idea that I am an inveterate ego-worshiper, under God’s constant suspicion, and deserving only of death, is part of the whole world of maya that has tormented me since my teens.
And yet, George MacDonald is right when he says:
But love is life. To die of love is then The only pass to higher life than this. All love is death to loving, living men; All deaths are leaps across clefts to the abyss. Our life is the broken current, Lord of thine, Flashing from morn to morn with conscious shine— Then first by willing death self-made, then life divine. Diary of an Old Soul, March 17
All love is death. This is an essential insight shared by all traditions that focus on absolute Love from and to an absolute One. This is also where Kierkegaard’s much-misunderstood concept of the “leap of faith” from Fear and Trembling still remains, for me, charged with potent meaning. This leap is a self-stripping, a gesture of final and absolute trust. The leap across this unbridged chasm is the only “bridge” to Life. It is not a denial for denial’s sake. It is consistent with, and meant to accompany, the full affirmation of the goodness of all our desires (in their root). We are good, our desires are good, and the only way to live is to entrust our whole being, with all its desires, absolutely and unconditionally, to our Source. And this denudation is not a hoop to jump through to get what we want! Kierkegaard (and MacDonald) saw this clearly. That is to put preconditions on the leap, which cannot be done. In his existential masterwork, Lilith, MacDonald has Mr. Raven say, “If you would have the rest of this house, you must not trouble yourself about waking. You must go to sleep heartily, altogether and outright.” (Chapter VI, “The Sexton’s Cottage”)
I am trying to describe something which is difficult to put into words accurately, although it is the shared experience of millions. Life is always available to us, but we experience Life only when God, our divine Source, is our only End. We experience that singleness of End as a real end of the road, as a real dying. It is not negation or denial of ourselves, or of the essential goodness of those selves and their desires. It is a death to illusion, to the world of maya, to the illusion of having an existence and life outside of the One. I theorize that one reason we experience this as a death is that, if we have no existence and life outside of our Source, that means that we have no life over which we have direct (or even indirect) control. By our fears we have become so invested in the need to feel in control of our lives that the necessity of the leap into Life encroaches upon us as a death knell.
Notice that all of this could be read in the language of, say, the book of Romans. It is not an exclusively Christian insight, but it could be argued that it has always lain at the heart of the Christian understanding of the universe. If we choose to name the maya-ridden frame of reference outside our union with the One as “self”, or “ego”, or “the old self,” or “the false self”, etc., then we could quite properly say that the only path to Life is through death to self. The Sufi author I have been reading, Kabir Helminski, seems quite comfortable with this language. However, because of all I have suffered through years of misunderstanding what it means, I prefer to use the word “self” in what I understand to be the Kierkegaardian sense of self-awareness (a necessary, good, and inalienable function of our spirits), or even as the center of our individuality, our essential innermost “person”, with its faculties of knowledge and will. In this sense, the death that we experience is the burning out of despair (again, in the specifically Kierkegaardian sense) from our selves that happens as we re-assent to the existential grounding of our self in our Source. The healing of the disease of self (despair) feels fiery, feels like a removal of essential tissue (so used are we to living with the disease).
Again, the leap of absolute trust into the arms of our One is an experience of death also in the sense of the removal of apparent options and possibilities. Of all the things that it appears that we could choose, of all the things that it appears that we could obtain by choice, we are choosing the One so steadily and absolutely that there is no room for anything else. (Again, Kierkegaard: “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”) All else must come to us through the One, or not at all. In Christian parlance, this is simply death to a life of independence from God. How many Christians, however, actually understand this well enough to be at rest in it? I could never rest there. It has taken understanding from outside the Christian tradition to reconcile me to what I now am growing to believe is the essential meaning of that tradition.
As far as I currently understand things, the two factors within my Christian inventory that militated against my ever coming to rest in the central miracle of death and resurrection were the factor of guilt (the idea that I should feel guilty for my failure to live the way I aspire to, the idea that sin separates us from God), and the factor of instrumentality (the idea that I should embrace the cross in order to get to the “fruit of the Spirit”, or “God’s purpose for my life”). Both of these misunderstandings have been deeply ingrained in me since youth, and I do see them as special weaknesses of WPC. I wasn’t able to relax enough to shake those shadows (or to begin to shake them–I am still in that process) until I glimpsed more complete freedom from the bogeyman of Scriptural authority. The freedom to acknowledge that the Bible could be wrong, in anything that it says, is giving me back the Bible, even the parts of it, like the Pauline epistles, that I most tied myself up in knots over as a young man. The authority of Scripture, the necessity of maintaining the pristine nature of verbal, canonical revelation, is perhaps the only item essential to and inherent in WPC that I have jettisoned. And it is a big one. (It could easily be argued that there is no WPC as we know it without the “sin separates us from God” bit, either.) But if the result is that I can actually say again, “I am crucified with Christ. I live, but no longer I: Christ lives in me” –and understand what I am saying, and why, I consider it, not a loss, but a gain.