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Losing our religion?

Losing our religion?

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Still shop of beginning of ABC news story on US religious decline

Last month, ABC News broadcast a 10-minute report titled, Is America losing its religion? So, more than just a sound bite. It began with the story of a Catholic parish in Buffalo, New York, with a large building but an ever-shrinking congregation. It formally closed last summer and the property has been sold.

The reporter spoke with a priest with the title “Diocese Vicar for Renewal and Development.” Despite that title, this priest’s primary role seemed to be managing the closing of parishes too small to continue. In the past twenty years, he said, their diocese had closed half its congregations, and more closures were to come. This process was euphemistically called the “Road to Renewal.”

The report discussed how this trend was broad based and transcended denominations. Examples were given of evangelical Protestant and mainline Protestant congregations in similar straights. The now oft-repeated statistic was cited that less than half of American adults say they are members of a religious community, a dramatic drop from 75 years ago. The result: congregations by the thousands are closing every year.

When asked why all this is happening, the Catholic priest gave an unintentionally ironic answer. “We’ve become a culture that doesn’t need God as much as we think we do.” Well, I think I know what he was trying to say, and I think he is wrong. Not needing God isn’t the issue.

Several times in the report, religious leaders expressed the view that in turning away from religion, people were turning away from God. I would challenge them to support that conclusion. Surveys show that belief in God has remained steady, including among those who have left organized religion.

Personally, I know of many people who have stopped being active church members yet remain people of faith, often with serious spiritual practices and voluntary service activities. But just as important, the converse also has to be admitted. Namely, that churches have always had many members who were spiritually shallow and often did little more than attend worship services, aka “go to church.”

For churches today, that disconnect has finally become too wide to maintain and is at a breaking point. Increasingly, people with a deep spirituality are finding the institutional church irrelevant. They are no longer interested in maintaining buildings, serving on boards and committees, attending rote worship services, and the other routines of church life.

On the other hand, the people who belonged to churches out of habit and family tradition are also disappearing. The “whiff of religion” they received from church isn’t enough anymore to keep them involved. Or just as likely, their children who have become adults, see no point in going through the religious motions their parents went through. As to anyone considering joining a church, the seemingly unending parade of sex and financial scandals and the polarizing politicization of many churches are all big turnoffs.

Today, churches are often dominated by retirees who remember when churches were full and often the center of people’s social lives. They don’t understand why things have changed, or don’t want to understand. They ensure that the proposals coming down the pike year-after-year for “renewing the church” ultimately go nowhere because they don’t want the church to change. They like it the way it is. And as their numbers shrink, so do their churches. Last one out, turn off the lights.

Unfortunately, many of those recruited for church leadership roles, including clergy, hang on to the old church traditions. It was disheartening to hear this relatively young priest repeating the worn-out trope that people are leaving church because they are leaving God. He needs to get out more.

But that’s the danger of institutions: at some point self-preservation becomes their primary goal. And leaders are selected for how strongly they affirm that goal. Yet the point comes when even a sinking ship’s captain has to cry out, “Abandon ship!” and direct everyone into a lifeboat or to grab a life vest and jump. The ship of the church may not be at that point, but it’s getting close.

While those committed to the institutional church see a society skidding into spiritual darkness, I see plenty of evidence of spiritual vitality. We are certainly in a time of exploration where new language, practices, theologies, and philosophies are being tried out and tested. Much may seem strange to the traditionalists, and much will be discarded along the way. But as individuals and in groups, in person and online, people everywhere are actively searching for a spirituality that meaningfully connects their life, in all its dimensions, with the Creative Energy that is our origin and the source of hope and renewal in all our difficulties.

What options does the church have to respond to this new spirituality? I think this popular organizational maxim is as good as any: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Rediscovering our sacred world

Rediscovering our sacred world

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Red rock cliffs and mountains near Sedona, Arizona
Red rock mountains and cliffs near Sedona, Arizona.

In his New Year’s Day blog post, Matthew Fox shared his “one wish for humanity” in 2025. I think it’s marvelous and I want to share it with you.

If I could have one wish for humanity this year, … it would be that we could rediscover our relationship to the cosmos, for it is from that relationship that our generosity, our gratitude, our wonder, our sense of reverence and of the sacred are rediscovered and energized anew.

Today there is a steady stream of proposals for dealing with the climate and other environmental crises. Those that seem to have the best chance of success have little chance of being adopted. Those that can be or have been adopted are too meager to make a real difference. For those like Fox who come at these problems from a spiritual perspective, the answer can’t begin with legislation or technology but a change of heart. It’s our attitude towards the world in which we live that first has to change.

Fox relates that he was once told in a dream that “there is only one thing wrong with the human species today: You have forgotten the sense of the sacred.” It is our misunderstanding of the natural world that is causing us to abuse it, coupled with our projection of God, our sacred origin, out into some great beyond. He quotes Thomas Berry (1914-2009), Catholic priest, scholar, and self-styled “geologian”, to explain this idea.

We will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred only if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things come into being.  Indeed, the universe is the primary sacred reality.  We become sacred by our participation in this more sublime dimension of the world around us. (emphasis added)

Realizing the truth of the sentence I put in bold is the essence of the spiritual transformation the world needs. So long as God is “out there” somewhere, nature remains just “stuff” for us to use and abuse as we choose. But when we recognize the sacredness of all that is, and especially the world and everyone who lives in it, our attitudes and behavior have to change.

So, as ridiculous as it may sound to some, our environmental crisis is, in fact, a theological and spiritual one, and needs a theological and spiritual solution. But where is that to come from? Most religions today are absorbed with their institutional survival and defending their doctrinal version of “the God above”, who is presumably the source of their authority.

Fewer and fewer people, however, share that concern or belief. While the church was not receptive to Berry’s assertion that “the universe is the primary sacred reality”, this has become one of the central tenets of the so-called “spiritual but not religious”. And what is important to realize is that this is not an intellectual conclusion but a spiritual experience. God, then, is not known primarily through doctrine or holy books, but an awakening to the sacred presence that pervades all reality.

I’ve just come back from a short trip to Arizona, including a visit to Sedona. It’s red rock cliffs and mountains were even more spectacular than I expected. Yet I could not help being affected by their incongruous relationship to the ever-expanding town spreading up and down the valley. Above the roof tops was amazing natural beauty while at eye level was the tourist staples of t-shirt and fudge shops, stores selling soap, candles, crystals and bad art, and countless restaurants and hotels.

Of course, I only know this because I, too, joined in the tourist parade. But I left wondering how places like this lost the sacredness experienced by indigenous people of the past (and often of the present) and became such commercial enterprises today.

It does seem we are approaching a tourism tipping point. We’ve all heard the stories (and perhaps have our own to tell): Mt. Everest polluted by equipment cast off by climbers waiting in line to ascend, cities banning or reducing tourist flows, park facilities worn out by visitor use and abuse, the search in our shrinking world for evermore distant and exotic locations to visit, seemingly to be able to say, “Oh, I’ve been there.”

The early Renaissance poet Petrarch claimed to be the first person since ancient times to climb a mountain (1336) just for the view. While he boasted of this, today I think it’s hard not to see this as a step backwards. For our ancestors, mountains, rivers, lakes, valleys, and other natural phenomena were often viewed as places where the sacred was especially present. The Celts called them “thin places”, where the normal separation of the sacred and mundane could be crossed more easily and profoundly. They were visited not to take pictures or get a stamp in a passport, but to have a deeper appreciation of one’s place in the universe.

Tourism and souvenir collecting have become one of the odd ways modern people create identity and self-worth. “See where I’ve been and what I brought with me from there.” It’s said that the bullets had barely stopped flying before people raced across the Gettysburg battlefield to collect discarded hats, pistols, rifles, and swords, even off the yet unburied dead, to have some memento of the historic, grisly event.

Ken Burns’ PBS special on the National Parks tells multiple stories of early park proponents being just barely ahead of developers wanting to exploit the country’s natural beauty, and not always succeeding. The overdevelopment of Niagara Falls became the symbol of what the park system was designed to avoid. I have to wonder why the stunning valley in which Sedona lies did not get the protective park status is clearly deserved.

The world’s development and growing population are making trips to “status destinations” increasingly untenable. Like the environmental crisis in general, the need is not for technical solutions to “ration” the experience of the world’s natural marvels. Rather, the need is for a new relationship with our planet and a new understanding of what our experience with it provides us.

To encounter the sacredness inherent in nature, we do not need to go to the travel guide books’ “great places.” Nature’s spiritual marvels are all around us, if we can tune our awareness to recognize them. If we step into a local park or our own backyard and really watch a bee pollinating a flower or birds building a nest, we can have a profound experience of the mystery and wonder of life.

It’s said no one can be an atheist after seeing the Grand Canyon. Yet the play of the natural world around us, in any place and at any time, can just as easily open our mind and heart to what Berry calls the “numinous presence” that surrounds and fills us. The rhythmic waves on any shore contain as much mystery and can inspire as much awe as those on the beach of a five-star tropical resort.

Matthew Fox, Thomas Berry, and many others have said that our lives will be disordered if our relationship with nature is disordered. Knowing our true place in the world, and thereby healing that relationship, is the necessary first step to steering our culture’s course away from disaster. Indeed, we need to come to understand this is what culture is primarily about. Fox quotes Albert Einstein’s belief in this.

The most important function of art and science is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive.

Spiritual healing and rebirth are not solely the tasks of organized religion but life tasks and the ultimate goal of any society. We are far from that understanding, yet we also seem to be increasingly far from knowing true peace and contentment in our daily lives. Hopefully, that pain and discomfort is causing us to look in new directions for our life’s meaning and value.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Voting in peace

Voting in peace

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Row of people at voting boothsThe media is full of stories about people in distress anticipating the results of today’s elections. Some can’t sleep or can’t get out of bed. Others are upping their meds. One doctor’s post I read said he had never seen so many patients with anxiety over this year’s election. Some act out in their driving or with other antisocial behavior.

Of course, our political rhetoric promotes this. Opposing candidates are demonized so that we are encouraged to imagine the worst possible outcomes if they are elected. Calamities of all sorts are feared if the candidate we support doesn’t win. And then there are fears about the electoral process itself—technical breakdowns, violence, endless recounts, lawsuits.

From anticipation and imagination come anxiety and fear. And so, the blessing and curse of the human mind appears again. One of the great advantages of our brains is that it allows us to predict the future with some degree of accuracy. This allows us to make plans to take advantage of good circumstances (rain and sun means plant crops) and prepare for difficult ones (cold and snow means grow enough crops to store for the winter).

But our ability to predict the future is actually very limited, often much more so than we realize. We can never anticipate all that the natural world will send us, including weather, disease, earthquakes, and the stray comet collision every few hundred million years. For a variety of personal reasons, including past experience, our imaginations can conjure of wildly unrealistic expectations about the future.

The primary factor in our distress about the unpredictable and uncontrollable future is, of course, our ego. This is the self we imagine our self to be. It lives somewhere inside of us, peering out through our eyes and registering neural inputs through our other senses. It talks to itself incessantly in our minds with our thoughts. A popular and simple definition of this self is our body-mind. It comes into existence at our birth, evolves and changes over time, and comes to an end at our death.

But let me just drop here a very different understanding of all this. It’s from the Anglo-American, 20th century philosopher, teacher, and entertainer (his word), Alan Watts.

You don’t really exist. That is, as an ego, a soul, a separate will. When you realize this, you’re liberated. Ego is an abstraction…. So is one’s self. There’s a happening, but that’s not you. By dying to yourself, finding you don’t exist, you’re reborn. Forgetting yourself, the universe flows on.

Watts is usually thought of as a Western interpreter of East Asian philosophy and religion. But he grew up an Anglican and was ordained in the US as an Episcopal priest. While what he says here may sound Hindu or Buddhist, in fact, it also reflects one of the most profound but usually forgotten (or ignored) teaching of Jesus. In all four gospels, Jesus tells his disciples enigmatically that they must lose their life in order to find it. He says in Luke, for instance:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.

Watts also echoes the famous dialog between Jesus and Nicodemus in John.

Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born anew.

By implication, in order to be born again, whatever was born the first time must come to an end. It’s in Paul, however, where this notion is expressed most explicitly. For Paul, this is the meaning of the cross, as he says in Galatians.

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Paul’s experience of the risen Christ meant the death of his “I”, his ego, so that now Christ, the Spirit of God incarnate, was recognized as his true self.

But wait—didn’t we start all this talking about election anxiety? How did we get sidetracked by Bible and theology? It’s a sign of the sad state of religion today that this is seen as taking a sidetrack. For at their core, all of the great religions are concerned with this question: Who am I, really? And they all seek to expose the imposter in this quest, the ego.

There may be no other place where egos are more on display than in an election campaign. Modern campaigns promote the person of the candidate far more than their position on issues, and denigrate the person of their opponent. And this clash of egos then drags in the egos of the candidate’s supporters.

Our egos are inherently insecure because they really don’t exist! One consequence is that we easily attach ourselves to other egos we admire, seeking to somehow claim their attributes as our own. This is the force behind the celebrity culture that has exploded in modern times. And politicians are now, essentially, celebrities, along with TV and movie stars, musicians, athletes, social media personalities, influencers, the “royals”, and anyone media outlets think can be used to attract “eyeballs” to their productions.

It’s not today’s political egos that concern us, however, but our own. Our anxiety over the results of today’s elections needs to be seen for what it is: fearing the defeat of our candidate as our own personal “defeat.” Because our ego is a product of our imagination, it easily spins fantasy worlds in which to exist, 99% of which are in the past or in the future (living in a fantasy present is usually called psychosis).

Our increasing dependence on the media with its inevitably artificial view of reality, and our growing frustration with our circumstances and fears about the world in which we think we live, leave us increasingly susceptible to manipulation by leaders of all sorts. They play sometimes upon our hopes but mostly upon our fears, to draw us into a worldview in which they will protect us and deliver us from disaster.

The ego loves the past and future. It has great difficulty living in the present. Tomorrow and each day that follows, and whenever the election results are known, we will wake up and go about living our lives. Much of it will go “according to plan” but often it will not, as has always been the case. We may rejoice over or bewail the election results, but their consequences for our lives will also be largely unpredictable and almost certainly not what we have imagined.

These days I keep coming back to Jesus’ simple teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6.

Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

Our anxious ego spins out countless fantasies of doom and disaster in our minds, which keep us unendingly entangled. Living in these fantasies, however, blinds us to the reality of the here and now, including the beauty of the lilies and countless other attributes of the world around us.

The world isn’t all lilies, of course. But as Jesus goes on to say, by ignoring the “troubles” of our fantasies, we will be able to handle much better the problems we actually encounter in the here and now. Because then we can respond out of “the peace that surpasses all understanding” of our true self, which only exists in the present moment, rather than out of the obsessions and anxieties of our imaginary ego.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

No going back

No going back

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I don’t read New York Times columnist Ross Douthat very much anymore, but when I do I can usually count on him to say something to make my blood boil. He accomplished that again last weekend.

It isn’t clear to me what commentary niche Douthat fills for the Times. Most of his topics fall under the categories of culture, politics, and religion, which is a pretty broad front. Religion, however, seems to be his special interest. Douthat, after a swing through Pentecostalism, became a convert to traditionalist Roman Catholicism. In other words, he leans much more toward JP II and Benedict than Pope Francis.

This weekend’s offending column was titled, “Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?” One of Douthat’s favorite topics is the decline of religion and the need to revive it. As he does here, he talks often about the sad consequences for society of religion’s shrinking importance.

Despite that concern, Douthat dismisses most movements for religious reform, whether from progressive Catholics or Protestants. And while he talks a lot about what society has lost with religion’s decline, rarely does he talk about that decline’s causes, like the sex abuse scandals, oppression of women, intransigence on moral issues, politicization, and generally clinging to an outdated premodern worldview. Douthat often gives the impression he would be very happy to return to the 1950s, if not much earlier.

There is so much wrong with this latest column of Douthat’s it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s a prime example of how if you don’t understand the problem, then of course you won’t say sensible things about solving it. He begins by recalling the best-seller popularity of various “anti-God” books published shortly after 9-11. Dubbed the “New Atheists”, these authors wrote high profile books about the anti-intellectual absurdity of religion, and the disastrous political and social consequences of fundamentalism, exemplified by the Al-Qaeda attacks.

Douthat mistakenly believes these books represented some dramatic turning point in modern religion’s decline. But their popularity actually showed the depth of a decline that was already well underway. No one read these books and thought, “Wow! I hadn’t thought of that before. I guess I’ll stop going to church.” Rather, most people read these books to have their previous doubts and disdain confirmed. And in that, the books were very successful.

Douthat begins with these 20-year-old books because the focus of his article are three new books showing, in his view, a way back to religion. The authors are all Christian neo-conservatives, like Douthat, who discloses he also has book along similar lines about to come out. Apparently, the publishing pendulum has swung to the other side.

I think Douthat’s biggest mistake is thinking that the crisis in Christianity is primarily an intellectual one. It does have such a problem to the extent that it clings to its ancient and medieval worldview. But that’s not primarily why people have been leaving the church. They’ve been leaving because Christianity is failing them as religion.

That’s not to say that people are leaving Christianity for some other of the world’s religions. As I’ve said before, all the world’s ancient religions are long past their sell-by dates. You can find neglected or abandoned temples and shrines everywhere. Religious revivals still happen from time-to-time, for mostly local reasons. But the fact is that for the vast majority of urbanized people, wherever they are, the traditional ancient religions simply do not connect with their modern lives. Yet people are still looking for spiritual meaning and direction.

Douthat blithely dismisses the rise of the “spiritual but not religious” as having peaked (based on one report out this summer). This is a good thing, in his view, since these spiritual seekers, unmoored from the guidance of religion, have been descending into all sorts of absurdities.

The decline of religious membership and practice is increasingly seen as a social problem rather than a great leap forward. People raised without belief are looking for meaning in psychedelics, astrology, U.F.O.s. And lately the rise of the “Nones” — Americans with no religious affiliation — has finally leveled off. So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago.

Douthat needs to get out of his evangelical academic bubble more often. There are no signs that churches are experiencing any kind of revival. Or that more people are finding “meaning” in psychedelics, astrology, and UFOs (!). Or that people are now “primed for religious arguments.” (Douthat is the type of evangelical who believes the answer to the church’s problems is to get more people to read C. S. Lewis.)

Despite its being disconnected from organized religion, the spiritual quest of people today is genuine and very much alive. It is necessarily amorphous and hard to measure. Those who study such things often dismiss it because it doesn’t fit into traditional religious boxes, but that’s a mistake. Something genuinely new is arising, even if its form is not yet apparent.

At the end of his essay, Douthat wonders “whether contemporary disillusionment with secularism is enough to draw people to the threshold of religion.” But why is religion the only option? Secularism was a response to the failures of religion. Yet religion’s flaws haven’t been fixed, so why would going back to it make any sense?

Today’s spiritual quest is not disconnected from the past but it is not a return to the past, either. It’s biggest difference, especially in relation to orthodox Christianity, is its dismissal of theism: belief in a divine being—God—somewhere “out there.” The bearded, robed man on a throne above the clouds simply can’t be reimagined in a way that makes sense in the modern world. Yet traditional Western religion simply cannot shake its attachment to this ancient, mythical figure. For modern people, however, it’s a nonstarter.

Yet the question which gave the initial energy to the great world religions remains at the heart of today’s spiritual searching: Who am I? In the 5th century BCE, the maxim “Know thyself” was inscribed on the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi. That goal has been a central pursuit of philosophy, religion, science, literature, and spirituality ever since.

In the modern world, difficulty answering the question, “Who am I?”, has been the primary source of popular anxiety and confusion. Religion used to provide a workable answer for us but doesn’t anymore. To say one is a “child of God” sounds reassuring until you realize you don’t have a meaningful understanding of who God is.

The essence of spirituality is the conviction that our being is spirit, and thus we are all divine, already and always one with God. While religion believes our goal is to find and connect with God, spirituality’s goal is for us to awake to the unity we already have with God. In the words of the French theologian and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin:

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The primary activity of worship is the verbal expression of praise and prayer to the God beyond us. The primary activity of spirituality is meditation, the growing awareness in contemplative silence of our true nature as spirit and one with God.

Spirituality is not foreign to religion. Far from it. But it has almost always been a “minority opinion,” contained in monasteries or among desert recluses. Whenever it began to expand beyond those confines, it was usually suppressed by religious authorities.

Today, spirituality is again spilling out into the world. This time, however, religious authorities lack both the power and the credibility to contain it. Instead, as Douthat does here, it is simply ignored, in hopes it will just go away. They don’t understand that it may well be our world’s best hope that it spreads far and wide.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

A God of silence

A God of silence

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Hurricane Milton image from spaceIn the days before Hurricane Milton made landfall, I saw multiple Facebook posts appealing to God for protection from the storm. They often were not for personal protection but for some specific location or the whole state, and often in very assertive language. One such post said,

In the mighty name of Jesus, we believe that Hurricane Milton will dissipate and cause no harm to the state of Florida. In the powerful name of Jesus. Amen.

The post had a graphic with a set of praying hands amidst swirling clouds over the Gulf, next to an image of the state of Florida. Similar posts had pictures of Jesus calming a stormy sea from a boat or on shore. The post quoted above had over 800 likes and over 200 responses, the largest number being simply “Amen”, often with one or more hands-together emojis. (In the US, most assume they are “praying hands” but, having been created in Asia like most emojis, they actually represent the gesture accompanying the Hindu Namaste greeting.)

A few responders expressed skepticism about the prospects of any divine intervention. Some of them in turn got surprisingly strong, often judgmental push-back for their lack of faith. A common theme of the posts I saw, as well as many of the comments, was the notion of “claiming” supposed divine promises of protection. Many responses to the skeptics included citing biblical stories of God saving or protecting people in danger. He did it before, so he will do it now.

I recognized these assertive “claiming” prayers as common to a certain strain of evangelicalism, often of the megachurch and Pentecostal variety. They are based on the conviction that believing strongly enough some presumed biblical promise will result in God fulfilling it. The strength of your belief, and the numbers who share that belief, will determine God’s reward.

In a worship setting, such prayers are a combination of “positive thinking” and group-think, and are often used to bind worshipers together. That’s the reason these posts got so many affirmations and why the naysayers were so firmly reprimanded. The skeptics disrupted the group cohesion of the post.

When Milton initially seemed to be behaving in a less destructive way than predicted, posts appeared claiming this was in response to people’s prayers. But as the actual extent of the damage and suffering became apparent, those posts disappeared. Less storm surge was accompanied by damaging winds, flooding rains, and (surprise) fatal tornadoes.

During the heyday of his 700 Club TV show, televangelist Pat Robertson once claimed to have “prayed away” a hurricane threatening his Virginia Beach headquarters. This was quickly slapped down by critics pointing out that the hurricane’s turn simply resulted in suffering and destruction happening somewhere else.

On the flip side was the assertion by Jerry Falwell and others the Hurricane Katrina was punishment for New Orleans’ debauchery, especially its hosting of an annual gay festival. The fact that the vast majority of victims had nothing to do with their city’s supposed depravity was ignored.

The idea that God punishes the wicked and protects and rewards the righteous is found throughout the Bible and is common in the Bible-based religions. This belief is especially prevalent in the Psalms, which probably explains their continuing popularity.

What is often ignored, however, is that such a belief is regularly challenged by other biblical writers. The prophets, especially, reject the notion that God will automatically give his people protection if they ask for it. Going further, wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes reject the notion that righteous living and piety will result in God’s blessings.

The Bible never resolves the issue. An overarching and unanswered question of the Old Testament is why God’s chosen people suffer so much. The New Testament continues that conversation by embracing suffering and death as the path to eternal life. But even there such a notion is never fully satisfying.

To put it bluntly, the biblical tradition struggles with the question: What good is a God who doesn’t help us, and in a predictable and reliable manner? Evangelical “claiming” prayers seem more like magic than faith. Say the right words and get the desired outcome. They also seem to be trying to manipulate God. You said You would protect us, so You have to come through for us when we ask.

Why do we appeal to God for help? Crying out when we are in distress or danger is a natural and automatic response, though not necessarily to God. John Shelby Spong quotes a woman who didn’t believe in God but in a time of great suffering cried out to the Universe for relief. The effect for her was probably the same. It expressed her distress and deep desire for her circumstances to be different.

So is God like a therapist or close friend, listening and nodding as we recite our problems, responding when appropriate, “I feel your pain”? In the progressive Christianity of mainline churches that seems to be the case. Even though prayers are said during weekly worship for the world’s problems and the needs of members, no one can explain what they believe will result from those prayers. Some will say that such prayers make us more aware of others’ needs and perhaps motivate us to act in some helpful way. That may well be true, but what has God got to do with it?

God as a Supreme Being far above us yet watching over everyone and everything is no longer credible for most people, including many religious people. Yet progressive churches have done little to help their members imagine, let alone experience, God in a different way. Countless numbers of theologians of the past two hundred years, Protestant and Catholic, have done valuable and productive work in this regard. Yet their own churches, often while saying affirmative things about them, have largely ignored their insights when it came to reshaping their beliefs and practices.

But it seems now that theology is not the way to move Christianity forward. Rather than more words, it is silence that is opening the way to a new understanding and experience of the Sacred. And some theologians themselves have recognized this.

One of the primary theologians of Vatican II, Karl Rahner, said that Christians of the future will be mystics or they will not exist at all. The great 20th century German American theologian, Paul Tillich, declared that God does not exist, but rather is the ground of existence. This was an idea he derived from the preeminent medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart. God is not a being but Being Itself. Such an understanding has support in many places in the Bible but probably the most well-known is a saying attributed to Paul in the book of Acts: “God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”

The essence of the mystical experience is not the God far off, out there, somewhere. Rather it’s knowing God right here, right now, within and all around us. In times of distress, we don’t appeal for God’s help so much as center ourselves in the sacred presence that is at the center of our being. By a life of “practicing the presence of God”, as Brother Lawrence described it in the 17th century, we come to know our essential security by our oneness with God and all things.

And this is primarily known in silence. As the Psalmist says, “Be still and know that I AM God.” This is how we experience what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It is a peace not of the mind but of the heart, not of words and ideas but of the boundless, silent Awareness that is our True Self. In the words of Meister Eckhart,

The Word lies hidden in the soul, unknown and unheard unless room is made for it in the ground of hearing, otherwise it is not heard. All voices and sounds must cease and there must be pure stillness within, a still silence.

Making room in our overfull lives and silencing the chatter in our minds is today’s spiritual challenge. Only then will we realize that we don’t need to cry out to God to come closer, but rather awaken, again quoting Eckhart, to the God “who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.”

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Speaking a new language

Speaking a new language

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Pillars of Creation photo by James Webb Space Telescope
Photo of the Pillars of Creation by the James Webb Space Telescope (2022)

Recently I came across a piece of writing that stunned me with its clarity and wisdom. It was an essay I came across on YouTube by a young man who creates videos on spirituality and nonduality. Going by the online name ASCENDOR, he has no apparent religious affiliation but has learned much from the world’s various spiritual traditions and from life.

There is an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony. It permeates all that is, both seen and unseen. It is the force that guides the stars in their orbits and sets the planets to dance in precise order. Effortlessly, it orchestrates the rhythm of the universe – from the gentle ebb and flow of the seas to the winds that carry the clouds across the sky.

Within this intelligence, everything finds its place. The trees grow as if they understand the language of light, stretching towards the sun, knowing that their growth is part of a greater plan. The animals instinctively follow their nature, migrating, hunting, resting, creating a perfect balance in the web of life. The seasons shift in an eternal cycle, as if an invisible hand gently directs them, allowing everything to bloom and fade at just the right moment.

Even in the smallest things, this intelligence reveals itself. A tiny seed, seemingly insignificant, contains within it the blueprint of an entire tree. It knows when to sprout, grow, and bear fruit – not through thought, but through pure being, through the infallible wisdom of life itself.

Everything happens in harmony, as if the universe were a single, vast symphony, where each note plays exactly in its proper place. This intelligence is not distant or separate from us; it is within everything we are and experience. It is in our breath, in the beating of our hearts, in every thought that comes and goes.

You have never seen a sulking or despairing tree, questioning its existence or losing itself in thoughts of the future. Trees live in natural harmony, rooted in deep trust. They surrender to the flow of life, carried by an intelligence far beyond the grasp of the human mind. In the same way, you too can let go of your worries, for they are not needed to live a beautiful life. When the weight of your worries lifts, the search ends. The ego-driven energy dissolves, and in this newfound vastness, the entire cosmos – everything that exists – becomes your family. Or, more accurately, you recognize yourself in all things.

What is being talked about here? Life, existence, reality, being, and “an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony.” There is so much to be pondered and explored in these words. One word that is not used, however, is “god”, though anyone from a religious tradition would want to say that is what the “intelligence” spoken of here means.

For me, however, this essay supports the late Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s belief that we should stop using the word “god”, at least for a long while. Regardless of one’s beliefs, the word has accumulated so many ideas over the centuries, and has become so rigid, that is hides more than it reveals. By avoiding the word, as is done here, we are forced into questioning and exploring, rather than assuming we’ve got “it all” figured out.

Yet religions have great difficulty with the idea that they haven’t each got it all figured out—and usually exclusively. Speaking in Singapore during his recent Asia trip, Pope Francis got himself into hot water by publicly expressing this inclusive viewpoint.

“Religions are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God…. If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God.”

The pope’s conservative critics once again were horrified at his openness and broad-mindedness. A retired archbishop responded incredulously,

“To suggest, even loosely, that Catholics walk a more or less similar path to God as other religions drains martyrdom of its meaning. Why give up your life for Christ when other paths may get us to the same God?”

Of course, he completely misses Francis’ point. God is the universal truth, not any religion. But this bishop and countless others like him are so wedded to their religious institutions that they can’t make that distinction. Such ossified misunderstandings are dragging religion down around the world.

The growing numbers of the “spiritual, not religious” reflects an attempt to find new language for this universal truth, ultimate reality, ground of being, which religion traditionally calls God. One of its most commonly expressed beliefs is that this ultimate reality is not in some particular place far off but here and now. As it says in the essay: “This intelligence is not distant or separate from us; it is within everything we are and experience.”

In a recent blog post reflecting on the pope’s words, Christian nonduality teacher Marshall Davis affirms his declaration but takes issue with one aspect of it.

In this regard both Pope Francis and his critics go astray. Religions are not paths to God. There are no paths to God. Religions are not different paths up the same mountain. Identifying religions as paths to God assumes that God is somewhere else and we need to travel to arrive at God. 

God is not somewhere else. God is here now…. If religions are paths, then they are dead ends. They often serve as barriers to discovering God. They become God substitutes….  

God is not found by hiking a trail up a spiritual mountain but by discovering that there is no trail and no mountain. There is only the Divine here now. All we need to do is open our eyes. We need to get out of our own way. All we need is eyes to see and ears to hear.  As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” 

Davis also just published a new video in his series on the spiritual awakenings of people in the Bible. This one is on Job. After chapters of talking about his sufferings, Job finally gets his meeting with God to find out what it’s all about. As Davis says, God doesn’t use theology or quote scripture. Instead, he gives a long speech about the wonders of creation. God is telling Job that he is never going to figure this out with reason. Instead, he needs to fully experience the world around him to discover his place within it.

This is the wisdom that this new yet ancient spirituality is appealing to, rather than the theology and rationalism religion has relied on for centuries. As ASCENDOR says in his essay,

There is an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony. It permeates all that is, both seen and unseen…. Within this intelligence, everything finds its place…. Even in the smallest things, this intelligence reveals itself.

Here are the seeds of a new creed for our time. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas said that the first book of scripture is the universe itself. How was that wisdom lost? Or why was it never assimilated in the first place? I’ve come to believe that the church’s anemic response to the climate crisis is due to it never sincerely believing in the sacredness of creation. And yet all of us have experienced spiritual renewal spending time in our gardens, gazing at the stars, or walking in the woods.

As Paul says in Acts, “God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Davis is right that there is no path to God. How could there be a path to where we already are? The “intelligence” at the heart of everything is here now, around and within us. We just need to be still, and look and listen, with our minds and our hearts.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

The problem with stories

The problem with stories

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Flyer for event promoting Israeli and Palestinian understanding and peaceThis past Monday evening I attended a public event at the local United Church of Christ congregation, which was co-sponsored by a Reform synagogue. The worship space was filled with some 300 registrants. We had come to hear a presentation by two representatives of an organization called Roots, which promotes reconciliation among Israelis and Palestinians on the West Bank. (You can find an account of the event in the Santa Fe New Mexican, from which come the quotations below.)

The speakers were Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, an American born émigré and Israeli West Bank “settler”, and Noor A’wad, a Palestinian peace activist and resident of Bethlehem. Schlesinger did most of the talking (A’wad said he couldn’t compete with a rabbi) but they both told powerful stories of their “conversions.” Each stressed how most Israelis and Palestinians have no contact with one another. In recent years, legal restrictions have made such interaction almost impossible, which makes Roots so remarkable. The organization’s main goal is to create opportunities for both groups to discover each other as human beings.

Both men also said that for most Israelis and nearly all West Bank settlers, Palestinians simply do not exist. That is, they are a “fake” people. There is no Palestinian state and never has been. They are Arabs who need to move to one of the other twenty-some Arab countries to live. And they need to leave because the land belongs to the people of Israel. For that reason, most Israelis also say there is no occupation. How can you occupy your own country? Israel is in the process of resettling its own land.

Schlesinger began by saying, ““We are here this evening to offer solutions — social, spiritual, educational and also political. We are here to light a candle in the darkness, the deep, gloomy darkness.” But the darkness of the chasm between Israelis and Palestinians described by Schlesinger and A’wad seems impenetrable.

Schlesinger was especially blunt in describing the situation. In his view today, both Israelis and Palestinians are peoples with legitimate claims to this ancient land. Until now, of course, both sides would have rejected such an interpretation, and most still do. In that understanding, one people can legitimately claim the territory as their homeland and other needs to get out.

Some time (probably not enough) was spent telling of Roots activities and programs, and its successes in creating new understanding and relationships between Israeli settlers and Palestinians. The realization Roots is seeking to create, as Schlesinger described his own experience, is to realize that “as glorious and legitimate as your story is, your people, your identity, there is another story out there, another people out there. And to mistake your story for the whole truth is very close to falsehood.” In the words of Ali Abu Awwad, who co-founded Roots with Schlesinger ten years ago, “You have to find a way to fit two truths into one heart.”

Despite the presenters’ best efforts, I left the event more pessimistic about the prospects for resolving this decades-long conflict. But perhaps that isn’t quite right. Rather, my appreciation of the intractability of this conflict was deepened by having a better understanding of what it was about. Bringing people together for mutual understanding and reconciliation is always of value. That doing so will lead to enough people learning “to fit two truths into one heart”, however, seems highly unlikely.

It was as Rabbi Schlesinger talked that I began to see the impossibility of his vision. A native of Brooklyn, Schlesinger is an unapologetic Zionist. In his view, Jews are a people of the land: a thousand years of residence followed by two thousand years of exile. And now they have returned. But—oops—someone else is already there. He has now recognized the injustice of just kicking these people out. Somehow, Israelis and Palestinians have to figure out a way to share the land and live in peace with each other.

But where does Schlesinger’s “story” come from? And why should everyone else accept what is essentially the story/belief of one religion? The story of Judaism is about as complicated a one as you will find. And it has only grown more so thanks to modern historical research. Much of the Old Testament tradition has been called into question. The two-thousand-year spread of diaspora Jews across Europe, Africa, Asia, and into the Western Hemisphere resulted in Jewish “identity” being a knot nearly impossible to untangle. To say modern Jews are “a people” only has meaning for those who claim such a designation.

But my point isn’t to criticize Jewish identity, or Palestinian, or anyone else’s. Rather, this week’s talk caused me to question again the purpose and value of the stories we tell about ourselves and the identities we claim based upon those stories.

As we all know, history is filled with accounts of wars, genocides, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, holocausts, and other kinds of destruction and slaughter inflicted by one “people” upon another. In most cases, those histories tell of divisions inflamed by power-hungry and self-serving “leaders”, often among groups which previously had been living with each other in relative tolerance and peace. Generational memories of evils committed by one group upon another can still be manipulated and stoked for political gain, as in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, India, and Rwanda, to name a few recent instances.

But where are these identities? Science can’t find them. There are no genetic markers for race, let alone ethnicity or nationality. And where are these stories? Only in our heads, implanted in our minds by our elders and by the culture in which we live.

National and ethnic identities are fast becoming a “luxury” the world can’t afford. The rise in global population means there is little if any vacant land for one group to go in order to avoid or end conflict with another. Similarly, many natural resources are becoming scarce, exasperated by the growing impact of the climate crisis.

Managing those shortages and ensuring fair distribution of resources becomes impossible when groups compete with each and rekindle past rivalries and animosities. It is acknowledged by many analysts, for example, that an underlying cause of much of the turmoil in the Middle East today is actually the shortage of water. National, ethnic, and religious rivalries distract from the actual problem and prevent its resolution.

As I’ve said, none of this is new except that such divisions are being dramatically intensified by our shrinking planetary home. Armed conflict today is too likely to spin catastrophically out of control for it to be a solution. But neither will diplomatic negotiation accomplish the compromises and cooperation needed so long as human separation is taken for granted.

One of the most startling quotations of Jesus is this portion of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

Many say that, however noble, this is Jesus at his most unrealistic. But that is because this statement and others like it are viewed as moral pronouncements. Jesus was not about creating a new moral code, however, though it is one of the most common ways of interpreting him. Rather, Jesus’ objective was to spark a new wave of human transformation through spiritual rebirth.

To claim to be a child of God has become an almost meaningless cliché in Christian circles. And while its pious overtones are now an obstacle for many today, Jesus meant it quite literally, as have countless spiritual teachers of all traditions down through the ages. Our true identity is divine. We are each one with the Source of all reality, the Ground of Being. Therefore, all human divisions are artificial and unreal.

Jesus says “love your neighbor as yourself” because it is literally true. We are one with all people. For the same reason, Jesus says here to “love your enemy,” because all our enemies are neighbors, as well. This, Jesus says, is what it means to live as children of God. And to drive the point home, he adds that God ignores the human labels of good and evil but pours life’s blessings on all people equally.

To the egoic self, wrapped in titles, roles, stories, and identities, all this is outrageous nonsense. But to our true self, the silent and formless Presence at our center, our conscious and peaceful eternal Awareness, such wisdom is the meaning of life: an eternal experience of grace and our union with the whole creation.

Is this really the path to peace in the Middle East? I have no idea. I do know that religion’s path of sin and guilt, law and morality, has not gotten humanity very far. It has tamed humanity’s worst inclinations but its capacity to do so in the future is in serious doubt. We don’t need more and better rules, commissions, and negotiating teams. What we need is a human awakening.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

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Storefront church
A storefront church in Toronto.

In almost any conversation about the church’s future, the elephant in the room, the thing everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about, is God. Perhaps it’s because people take God as a given, needing no discussion, but I don’t think so. For some it may be that they would feel too awkward or embarrassed. But I think the main reason God is “off the table” is that people know it would open a can of worms. It would reveal that people are all over the map on who or what God is, and that few adhere to the church’s “official” position.

It’s been well over a century since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead … and we have killed him.” Despite hysterical distortions by his opponents then and since, Nietzsche was basically reporting a historical fact: the notion of God common in the ancient and medieval world was no more. That God was “killed” by the creation of a science-based world that has no place for such a God. That God is now homeless and unemployed, since heaven has no place in the universe and the universe has no need for God to keep it going.

Are a scientific worldview and the idea of God incompatible? Well, yes and no. If God is a being in some extraterrestrial location called heaven, who intervenes in the operation of the universe and the affairs of humanity, then yes, you have to choose one or the other. And if you choose science, then no God. This, of course, is the fundamentalists’ assumption and the reason for their hostility to the modern world.

Yet most Christians (including most fundamentalists to a degree) want to have their cake and eat it too. They accept science and the marvels it has brought to modern life, yet somehow also want to keep a personal God existing somewhere out there. Thus, Christians live with their religion and their science-dominated daily lives in separate compartments, with interaction between them rare and, when it does happen, awkward, if not explosive.

Or at least, that’s how it’s been. For I think we have reached a tipping point where most people now find this an impossible and unnecessary juggling act. The one bond above all others which has held people to the church is finally dissolving, and that’s a belief in a theistic God, God as an extraterrestrial being somewhere out there.

I say both impossible and unnecessary because people are discovering that, despite the church’s age-old denial, there are other ways to understand and experience God. Furthermore, many Christians are discovering that within Christianity there have always been alternative viewpoints, expressed by the mystics but also more than a few theologians, not to mention countless ordinary clergy and lay church members.

The growing number of those identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is the most tangible sign of this movement. These are people who have abandoned the theistic deity of traditional religion yet maintain a belief in an essential spiritual and sacred dimension to life. As surveys have shown, many may still express a belief in God, but often this is not the God of the church’s creeds and doctrines. This is often a God of experience rather than of theological belief.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post called “God Has Left the Building” and discussed how spirituality is rapidly displacing traditional notions of religion like Christianity.

Spirituality is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, and of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

The biggest thing missed by today’s distressed church leaders is that the church’s decline is largely a rejection of worship and the theistic God worship is centered on. Shrinking worship attendance means that millions of people have realized that they can get along fine without it and its weekly reconnection to the God-out-there. This is the reason the pandemic lockdown was such a blow. Forced to stop their worship practice, many discovered they didn’t really miss it and found other things to do with that time.

The pandemic lockdown was a missed opportunity, for this was when the church could have recognized that worship’s time is over. As I go on to say in the post I quoted above, the problem with worship is the church’s problem with God. The theistic God in heaven, the “sky God” as he’s sometimes been called, or God as Batman as Sam Harris described him, swooping in to rescue us from disaster, simply doesn’t work in the world today. As long as it clings to such a notion, the church can’t say anything intelligible, let alone meaningful, about such a God.

As I have shared these ideas in various places and settings, I rarely if ever get any pushback. While some raised in the church still cling to its traditional notions, the vast majority of people, both inside and outside the church, have moved on. Yet the church has hardly budged. Especially in worship, its hymns, liturgy, prayers, creeds, and preaching still assume this yawning gap between God, reigning in heaven, and the world and each one of us.

Spirituality is the recognition that there is no gap. God, as Paul says in Acts, is the one “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Or as St. Augustine said, and many spiritual teachers have repeated over the centuries, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And as Meister Eckhart says, the man who 700 years ago spearheaded the greatest effort to redirect the church toward this orientation:

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

Churches measure their vitality by how many people are in worship, yet it is worship that is dragging down the church. It is like an addiction, a habit the church can’t let go of. That many people, especially clergy, would be astonished, and even outraged, at such an idea shows how difficult breaking this habit will be. They don’t see that culture is breaking that habit for them, as churches close by the thousands.

No doubt many repurposed churches will retain a regular community gathering, though hopefully called something other than “worship”. But here is the great learning opportunity: let members reexamine church traditions and decide how they can be reimagined and repurposed, or that they just need to go. What opens us to recognize God’s presence here and now? How do we recognize the holiness of this time and place, of everyone present, and of the world around us? And how do we tell the story of Jesus, not as the Son of God, but as a child of God who lived to show that this is the identity of every person?

For this, finally, is what a repurposed church is about: following Jesus as the revealer of our oneness with God, of our true nature as Spirit, of each of our beings as a unique embodiment of God’s own Being. In that light, much of what has passed for “essential” church life will fade away or be radically reimagined. The church will no longer proclaim the “story of salvation” as Christ’s deliverance of the world from sin. Rather, the church will be a place to “experience salvation” as the awakening to our true nature, revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching.

A repurposed church will be a place to learn from spiritual masters of past and present, whatever their religious label. Here people will be guided to follow the “pathless path”, which leads them to where they already are by discovering they have never NOT been apart from God, but only lost in their egoic mind’s delusions of separateness. In a repurposed church they will be supported in a journey inward, to discover both their true selves and the God who is the core of their being. As Meister Eckhart taught,

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.

This may be the most difficult of the lessons a repurposed church must learn, but it is crucial. That after a centuries-long obsession with words—scripture, creeds, doctrines, theology, sermons, hymns, prayers, liturgy—God is not found in them. Rather, as Elijah learned at the mouth of his cave, God is in our silence. And in a repurposed church, silence will be its sacrament.

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Repurposing the church

Repurposing the church

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A former church now become a restaurant
The former Good Shepherd Lutheran Church building now serves as a restaurant.

Earlier this month, a New York Times article told the story of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, not far from O’Hare airport. Well, it actually told the story of its building because Good Shepherd no longer exists. It closed a number of years ago and its building, situated in a pastoral lakeside setting, was converted into an upscale restaurant. The article highlights one couple who came to the restaurant to celebrate their wedding anniversary. They had been married in that same building 34 years earlier.

The story goes on to tell of a number of church buildings around the country repurposed in a variety of ways.

Around the world, houses of worship have been converted to restaurants, breweries, hotels, art centers, theaters and even sports complexes. Some abandoned churches have been transformed into mixed-use developments, blending retail and residential space, and affordable housing.

A church in New York City became a disco and one in St. Louis a skate park. Years ago, I stayed in a Chicago church that had become a B&B and I’ve seen a number of church buildings converted to single family homes.

The possibilities are presumably endless—as are the opportunities. Churches are closing by the thousands every year. A sociologist of church trends is quoted as saying that 100,000 Protestant churches in the US could close this decade, which would be close to 20% of such congregations. This after thousands closed in prior years. The story for Roman Catholic parishes is much the same.

Having spent most of my professional life in churches, I can say with some confidence that this situation will only get worse before it gets better, whatever “better” might mean. For most of the people remaining in churches, better means stopping their church’s membership shrinkage and then start growing again. Na’ gonna’ happen. But it’s almost impossible to convince churchgoers of that. I know. I’ve tried.

The people remaining in congregations like going to church. Most have done it all their lives and want to keep doing it as long as they can. Talk of changing, renewing, remaking, transforming the church gets a blank look from them. “We like it the way it is. We just wish there were more of us.” But in fact, their numbers are getting steadily older and fewer. Last one out, turn off the lights.

Now one might think church leaders, who are primarily clergy, would be steering churches in a new direction but they don’t get it either. For most of them, also, the primary goal is to preserve the institution. Which isn’t surprising since clergy are essentially trained to be institutional leaders. But that’s unfortunate since it is the institutional nature of Christianity that is the problem.

In a blog post last fall, Marshall Davis, a retired Baptist minister and now teacher of nondual Christianity, sees the church’s day of reckoning fast approaching.

The church does not have a problem; the church is the problem. The church thinks the problem is in the culture outside the church, but the real problem is in the church culture. The church does not see that, and therefore it has no motivation to change. Instead it doubles down on the culture wars. Because of the church’s spiritual blindness, the only solution left to God is so drastic that no one wants to think about it.

The church needs to die, so it can be resurrected as an entirely new creation. For that reason I am not dismayed when I read ever-worsening statistics about the decline of the church. I see God’s hand in it. Like a gardener or farmer, God is turning over the soil, in order to prepare for a new season.

Most people today just aren’t interested in belonging to a church, or to any other religious organization for that matter. That’s very hard for Christians, lay or clergy, to comprehend. For them being a Christian means belonging to a church. They enjoy the worship services (mostly), the “coffee and” after worship, Bible studies, service opportunities, etc.

Primarily, though, people enjoy the friendships they have with other church members who they encounter at such events. But newcomers or people outside a congregation’s “inner circle” often find these activities are “not all that.” Add to that the scandals, political divisions, and internal squabbles that rack many congregations and folks looking in from the outside will say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

More than the church’s organizational flaws, however, is the fact that it is simply not offering what people are looking for. In clinging to its traditions, the church has been blinded to a cultural sea change occurring all around it. The result, as Davis says in a later post, is that people are looking elsewhere to meet their spiritual needs.

I see God at work in the hearts and minds of people who are leaving the church. People are looking more closely at what they believe … and don’t believe. They are deconstructing the faith they were raised in (if they were raised in a religious tradition). Upon careful examination, many are deciding that their religious tradition is not true. 

So church decline has little to do with liberal or conservative. It has everything to do with people looking for meaning and purpose, beauty and truth, community and meaningful relationships in life. People are not finding those in churches, so they are looking elsewhere. They are looking to other religious traditions and humanistic philosophies. They are exploring other spiritual practices and beliefs.  

Throughout my ministry career, I have watched my denomination, and others like it, struggle to stem their decline. The proposals and renewal programs have been endless, and millions of dollars spent on them. Nothing has changed. But to use a commercial metaphor, all of these efforts have dealt with the packaging. No one, it seems, whether in the pews or the pulpit, dares to question whether it might actually be the product itself that is the problem.

Specifically, but only briefly, the church needs to finally acknowledge that its ancient sin/salvation shtick is over. Not only are people outside not interested in it but many in the pews—and pulpits!—don’t buy it anymore, either. The carrot-and-stick of heaven and hell are way past their sell by date. Many churches today, of course, barely pay lip service to this tradition. Yet it is still at the core of these churches’ creeds, liturgies, calendars, prayers, hymns, and education materials.

“But that’s what Jesus is all about, isn’t it?” That’s certainly the direction the early church pulled him and it’s the direction the church has gone ever since. But there is good evidence now that many early Christians were not onboard with that viewpoint and instead understood Jesus very differently (see the gospel of Thomas, for instance, where the crucifixion and resurrection are never mentioned). And throughout its history, there has always been a minority in the church who viewed Jesus as something other than a “savior from sin”, the mystics being the most notable.

More importantly, thanks to modern New Testament scholarship, and when we remove our “savior-colored glasses”, it has become easy to see that Jesus himself showed little interest in salvation religion, his “attack” on the temple being perhaps Exhibit A. Rather, his primary concern was with the suffering of people in their daily lives, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. In Mark, the gospel’s “good news” is that God’s kingdom is here, now, at our finger tips. And in Luke Jesus declares,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

While the church certainly affirms these texts, what isn’t acknowledged is that they have nothing to do with the ancient sin/salvation mantra the church has recited for nearly two millennia. It is so ingrained that, as I said above, the church’s predicament will have to get worse before it gets better. People within the church today won’t be able to undo the doctrines, imagery, and language that have sustained the church for so long. It’s what they’re there for.

Nonetheless, I share Marshall Davis’ view that from this dying will come a new rising. The Spirit is indeed “turning over the soil.” It may not look like much now but in the spring, however long that is in coming, new growth will appear. Then, repurposing church buildings will give way to repurposing the church itself.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Walking each other home

Walking each other home

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In my last blog post, I mentioned the name of Ram Dass as one who was an early proponent and practitioner of spirituality apart from religion. To many, Dass (1931-2019) was the quintessential 1960s/70s hippy, but he was also a serious thinker and writer and deeply compassionate.

Two sayings came to be associated with him, often appearing on bumper stickers and posters. The most well-known was “Be here now.” This is the challenge to the tendency of our minds to be focused on the past or future, or on what we imagine is happening somewhere else. Being in our heads someplace other than “here, now” is the primary cause of our distress and anxiety.

The other phrase, which I think is equally powerful, was, “We are all just walking each other home.” The meaning of this may not be as immediately obvious. Dass often used it in the context of being present with the dying, but he understood dying as a lifelong spiritual journey. To me it is one of the simplest descriptions of our spiritual life and of what Jesus (and others) saw as our calling in life.

The overarching theme of Jesus’ teaching was the kingdom of God. The meaning of this phrase was not obvious. It was not an idea found in the Old Testament, which talks instead about the political kingdoms of Israel and Judah, so it left most of his hearers puzzled. Jesus never gives a clear definition of it, preferring instead to describe it with metaphors and to tell stories about it through parables.

It seems that even Jesus’ most devoted followers never really understood him. At the beginning of Acts and just before the resurrected Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the disciples ask him, “Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” One imagines Jesus shaking his head and thinking, “After all this, you still don’t get it.” Instead, what he says is that it’s not his decision to make, but hang tight for the coming of the Spirit. At Pentecost it’s made clear that God’s plan is for the whole world. But “the plan” always remains a mystery.

Jesus’ parables and other teachings make clear that the “kingdom” he is talking about is metaphorical. It is not a political or geographical entity, nor is it something to anticipate happening in the future. This is said most explicitly in Luke 17:

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among and within you.”

In the noncanonical gospel of Thomas, Jesus says,

“[The kingdom] will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

In a surprising story in Mark 12, Jesus is challenged to name the most important commandment. After responding, a scribe congratulates him on his answer and then expounds upon it in greater detail. Jesus in turn affirms the scribe’s response, saying, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” The words “not far” imply a spatial relationship, yet it is obviously not literal but metaphorical. The kingdom is somehow “present” but we may be at some distance from it.

Things lost and returning to where they belong is a frequent theme of Jesus’ parables. Of these, the most well-known is the parable of the prodigal son. The familiar story tells of a younger son who wants to leave home and see the world. So he travels to “a far country,” squandering his inheritance from his rich father in the process. Destitute, he realizes his family home actually has all he wants so he goes back and is rapturously welcomed by his father.

A second parable is ingeniously attached to the first. It tells of the elder son’s bitterness as his father’s welcoming back his useless brother. However, the story reveals that the elder son has never appreciated what he was blessed with living with this father. While physically present, he too was “lost” and far from home.

Meister Eckhart understood the message of these stories and what it means to be in God’s kingdom. He summarizes the human predicament in a quote I used last time. In this translation, however, the connection to the parable is obvious.

God is at home. We are in the far country.

Thus, according to Eckhart and to Jesus’ lost-and-found parables, the mystery is not where to find God but why have we left our true home where God has been all along. The “returning home” experience is summarized in a line from the popular hymns Amazing Grace.

I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.

Now the deeper meaning of Ram Dass’ saying becomes apparent: “We are all just walking each other home.” To be lost and wandering is the human predicament. Our life journey is finding our way back home and helping others along the way to do the same.

But what and where is “home”? As I’ve said many times before, the corruption of religious language makes it hard to take the Bible and theology seriously. Ironically, the same was true in Jesus’ day, which is why he resorted to parables to communicate his ideas.

Home is where we belong because it is where we are from. We can rephrase Jesus’ response to the scribe as, “You’re almost there; you’re almost home.” The gospel of John, written for the Christian community decades after Jesus, sees Jesus as a symbol for home, the place where we are meant to “abide.”

I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.

The turning point for the prodigal son is when he “comes to his senses.” Amazing Grace talks of being found and regaining sight. The most common description which transcends religious and spiritual traditions is “waking up,” from delusion to reality.

Where is home? It is all around us, and within us, Jesus says, if only we could see it. What is home? It is our true self, our being, experienced as pure silent awareness, but obscured by the made-up roles and identities we have accumulated over our lifetime, and the endless chatter in our heads.

To be at home is to know our oneness with the Source of all reality, the ground of being, with “God,” if that word works for you. This Oneness is beyond words, in any case. All we have are pointers and metaphors. But more important than words to describe it, is the experience of being home. Paul calls it “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It’s the deeper truth of the saying, “Home is where the heart is.”

We are all on the journey home. It can be arduous and frustrating, filled with distractions and detours, but there are guides along the way. And it all becomes less stressful, and seems more doable, when we realize that we are all on the same journey, that “we are all just walking each other home.”

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.