Straight Up

For a while now, I have been in what seems like a transition of sorts.  I think the spiritual life is a continuous starting over again experience.  I have traveled a long and winding road, and I don't really know where I am headed.  I came from a very Pentecostal/Evangelical (and yes I know that these two things are not synonymous) background, flirted with Eastern Orthodoxy and was ultimately received into the Catholic Church in September 2006.  I started out a very right winged Catholic, ready to duke it out with whoever dared or was foolish enough to cross intellectual swords with me the know it all.  It was simple, I was right, everyone else was wrong, and the sooner everyone figured that out, the easier we would be able to get along.  I was quite ready to denounce anybody and everybody, consign them all to hell, all in the name of truth and the so-called love and justice of God.  In retrospect, it seems an inescapable conclusion now that I was simply projecting my own fear, insecurity, vanity and anger onto those I attacked and labelled everything from atheists, secular humanists or nominal Christians. There is an old buddhist saying, that the enemy without serves only to mirror and reveal back to us the true enemy within.  I hurt and alienated a lot of people, and today I feel pretty small because of that.  So if you are one of those people, I apologize...

About a year and a half ago, I made a decision to allow my faith, my assumptions, and my whole way of life and thought process to be challenged.  I let my guard down, completely down, and let in all of the ideas that I was so careful to keep at bay for so long.  I simply let go,and allowed myself to be undone.  Once and for all I would listen, really listen, to those voices who for so long were screaming in the back of my mind that I wasn't as sure about my own religion and culture as I mistakenly believed.  Throughout the process, I allowed everything to be challenged.  My theism, my christian exclusivism, my uncritical acceptance of the Bible, my pseudo-scientific ideas about the age of the earth, my prejudices against homosexual people, people of other faith traditions, ALL OF IT.  I put it all under the microscope, exposed it all to scrutiny and criticism.  For the first time in a long time, at least since I had become a "born again christian" back in 1992, I opened myself and my mind specifically to intellectual honesty and a thorough introspection.  In the end, I decided that the only thing I could do to maintain any sort of personal integrity and authenticity was to once and for all acknowledge my own folly, my own ignorance, my own pride and narrow mindedness.  If I wanted to keep my sanity, I had to let it all go.  Once and for all.  So I did.  To my shock and surprise, I let it all go, only to rediscover it anew!

The ideas and values of the enlightenment and modernity have made huge inroads into my life and thinking.  I have come to believe that any "god" that we can somehow "prove exists,"  simply isn't worth believing in.  God is Mystery, and that Mystery needs to be encountered and experienced.  Knowledge about God, and Knowledge of God are two very different things.  Today I think it impossible that any one group or faith tradition can have the market cornered on God.  To believe that one tradition is the only way is incredibly short-sighted in my estimation, and rejects the full human testimony and patrimony to our encounter with the divine.  I have come to appreciate the Bible in a whole new way, now that I have come to appreciate the critical approach, and have a better understanding of the difficulties within the text itself.  This idea that the book dropped out of the sky as is and ready to use is a fantasy.  In fact, it can be a very dangerous fantasy. Today I also embrace as sacred the holy books of other faiths and traditions.  I have embraced the findings of mainstream science and I see no difficulty in accepting the reality of a very old universe, and the mythos of the Genesis account of creation.  I have also struggled to do a thorough rethink on my thoughts and feelings towards homosexual people.  It was so much easier to be a bigot when homosexuals were "those people" over there.  So much easier to judge them, dismiss them, hate them, (even though I would mask that as some sort of holy indignation, God hated them, so it was ok for me to as well.  Again though, even that was masked with the old  hate the sin love the sinner cliche.) and keep them at arm's length by always making sure they remained a "them."  But what happens when you find out that you have family that come out, and reveal that they are gay?  What happens when you see their pain, their struggle to have kept it a secret for so long, their struggle to come out and be themselves and be honest and forthright with their families?  All of a sudden the game changes, and "they," in the blink of an eye, become "we," become "us."  And the walls we put up, the prejudices we nurtured for so long, crumble.....simply crumble under the weight of their own foolishness.

I think I realize now that it is the honesty and integrity of the search itself, the doubts, the reverses and starting overs, mistakes and regrets, and the willingness to keep going that truly expresses faith.  Humility before the unknowable mystery of God, the acknowledgement of our own weakness and inability to understand, makes possible our own interior life, our own self mastery.  It empowers us to discover ourselves in others, to be accepting of others, and to show kindness and compassion.  It troubles me deeply now when I see a any form of attack against the rights and beliefs of others.  Whether they be Muslims, Jews, Hindus, homosexuals, scientists, or scholars, (I mention these because these are the ones I attacked as a "Christian" for so many years), and yes of course I am troubled if my own Christian brothers and sisters are attacked as well.  But I hope never to find myself on the attacking side ever again...  Whether its my daughter who one day comes to me and tells me she is in love and wants to marry a Muslim man, or my son who comes to me and tells me his gay, or any family member or friend who takes me into their confidence to reveal their heart to me, I want them to know that nothing would ever change my love for them, my acceptance of them, and that I will stand with them in support and love.

God is love...