God is Love, Love is Mercy, Jesus Shows us the Way

So the basic premise of the Christian religion, faith, world-view (you name it) is this:  we are inherently "fallen" by nature, thanks to "original sin" of our first parents (the mythical Adam and Eve of the Garden of Eden), and there is nothing we can do to fix our predicament.  BUT God nonetheless loves us anyway, and that's why He sent Jesus to endure the justice due for us to be reconciled with Him.  THEREFORE, the natural response - and the only acceptable response - is to live from a place of gratitude and follow Jesus, professing Him as our Lord and Savior.

I like the idea of living from a place of gratitude.  I like the idea of recognizing our own helplessness in a lot of life's circumstances.  I like the idea of God's mercy and forgiveness.  But I simply do not accept the original premise of original sin.  I do not believe that we come out of the womb already damned because of our sinful nature.

Even Adam and Eve, when God originally created them, must have had some sort of inclination towards turning away from God, this potential had to have been in them or else they never would've acted on it.  God put that possibility into the very DNA of human beings!  "To err is human" is not a bug; it's a feature!  We learn from our mistakes.  We take risks, pick ourselves up and try again.  We accept dissapointment.  We acknowledge our own need for mercy and therefore extend that mercy to others who need it.  Or at least, that's the idea.  There is nothing shameful about our tendency to stray from time to time!  To deny this is to walk down the path of scrupulosity, which I know all too well from first hand experience, and which has the potential of turning into a psychiatric disorder!  (Moral OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder)

Why would God create the first humans in such a way so as to "test" them out, seeing if they love Him, and then when they make the first big mistake by doubting Him (a process of individuation for any adolescent, by the way, so a natural part of growing up), He banishes them from His presence?  And then to save face, He incarnates as Jesus in order to make things right, instead of just forgiving them on the spot, or even after kicking them out admitting that was excessively harsh, and let's debrief and see where we went wrong and how to avoid it in the future?

That very first move by God to kick Adam and Eve out of Eden is where the entire Christian premise falls apart for me.  I cannot feel shame for my human nature and maintain a healthy psyche, and so I cannot get overly emotional about Jesus's "sacrifice on the cross" because I don't believe that's what it was.  His crucifixion was indeed an act of love in that He had the chance to go back on His teaching but He did not.  He refused to compromise, knowing full well that it could/would cost Him His life.  But He believed that the message He had was important enough to die for, to suffer for.  That is still valuable, and that is still a reason to follow Jesus.

It is not, however, a reason to worship Him or confuse the Messanger with God.  Nor is it a reason to turn to one of the other monotheistic religions that either ignore Jesus or recognize Him as only a prophet, because no organized religion has been able to stay fully true to Jesus's message, without adding to it the traditions of men, something Jesus actually spoke out against!  

Jesus's words alone have the power to transform lives, without all the extra beliefs ABOUT Him.  Yes, He said "you believe in God, believe in Me also" (John 14:1).  But first of all, notice He differentiates between "God" and "me" here.  Second of all, believing "in" Him doesn't mean believing specific things "about" Him.  When I believe in someone, that means I trust them.  And here Jesus is asking us to trust Him.  What does it mean to "believe in God"?  Maybe He means the same kind of belief for both Himself and God?  But again, He doesn't say "believe that God and I are the same thing" or that "I am God, too".  If you believe "in" God, you 1) believe God exists, and 2) trust God.  There's nothing else to believe.  Everything else we are taught about Jesus has been added by His followers.

And so, back to my original point - if the first premise of Christianity is that we are in need of a savior, I counter that in one of two ways.  One - that may be true, but who is to say that this savior is the person of Jesus on the cross?  It may actually be Jesus, but the manner in which He saves is through His teaching, and our free will is to obey Him, not to "believe stuff about Him".  Or, two - we don't actually need a savior.  What we need is a dose of reality, which includes humility - a recognition that we are not God, that we make mistakes, that we need mercy, that we ought to extend mercy to others, that in spite of being imperfect God expects us to try our best anyway, that we have a lot to learn, etc.  Our salvation is not a one-and-done event done vicariously on our behalf, but rather a lifetime of forming the habit of turning to God - the literal antedote to what Adam and Eve did when they turned away from God.

We prove our love to God - the original purpose of free will that allowed Adam and Eve to sin - by choosing God over and over and over, by turning to Him in prayer, meditation, mindfulness, contemplation, through acts of service and patient endurance, through small or great sacrifices, and especially through mercy.  The one alternative to the idea of Jesus-as-Savior-on-the-Cross is God-as-merciful-right-off-the-bat.  That's supposed to be our take-away from that story - what we wish God had done for us - shown mercy - is what we are called to do.

Christian Mystics and ... me?

Contemplative mystic.  I don't want to get ahead of myself, but that's the goal.  I think I've figured out why I can't otherwise fit into any religious mould.  I'm confusing spirituality and religion because I am actually both, but they are not necessarily related.

What I mean is that my religiosity is based on my background, familiarity, personal preferences.  Namely, I resonate with the rituals of Catholicism, specifically Eastern Catholicism.  Divine liturgy takes me outside of the mundane and provides an easy way to remind myself that there is other-worldliness "out there" (or rather, all around and within).  

Even some of the rules or regulations of Catholicism I can appreciate.  My autistic brain appreciates the boundaries of clear rules, even if I choose to question where those boundaries ought to be, or how one ought to interpret them.  I just need a starting point, but I do need that starting point.  For instance, I appreciate the ten commandments to keep me in check and to better gauge if any given action is a good idea.  

But interpreting the first or second commandment (depending on whom you ask) to mean I should not perform metanoias in venerating an icon of Chris, for instance, is incorrect in my mind.  It's splitting hairs and getting way too far away from the spirit of the law, which is to place God before all else.  If performing the physical ritual of bowing to or kissing a representation of the object of my devotion (so long as it is God or one of God's helpers) deepens my desire to do God's will, then that desire actually lived out is my worship.  The bowing down/kissing is not the worship, but merely the inclination of my heart towards that worship.  It still needs to be followed up with actual worship - in spirit and in truth, or lived out in daily life.

Likewise, religion also centers on certain theological beliefs which I do not necessarily hold or interpret in the same way as "the mainstream" within my tradition.  The creed comes to mind.  "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible."  Does this have to mean that I imagine God to be a male parent?  Some would say that indeed, God's energy must be masculine in that He is wholly independent of anything else, and that a faminine energy within God would mean some level of dependence on something outside of Himself.  Fair enough, but even then, is God "a person"?  No, trinitarian Christians say that God is "three persons in one God".  That is something with no human analogy.  One person holding three roles is probably the closest we could get to it, but it's not really correct because that one person would have to be schizophrenic to really be "like" the Trinitarian God - he'd have to be able to talk to himself from one role to another, to have one of his roles (say, that of son) love himself in another of his roles (say, that of father) and to love so intensely, that a third of his roles would then manifest.  See, the analogy starts to run away from us.  Point being, God cannot be defined.  And the creed precisely tries to do just that.

But where I have the most trouble with the creed is in the larger second section dealing with Jesus. 

 "And in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God" (so far, so good... but before we get too comfortable, the next part continues:) 

"the only-begotten, born of the Father before all ages.  Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, one in essence with the Father,"  In other words, Jesus is NOT like any other human being, and so what we were likely thinking (Jesus is a child of God like I am a child of God) is denied right off the bat, and very vehemently.  Not only that, but Jesus is said to preexist his earthly life, again unlike the rest of us.

Unless... the preexistence of Jesus is also a comment on our preexistence as pre-incarnate souls.  But of course, that is not the Church's intention, for then Jesus's description ends with: "through Whom all things were made."  Now, if we equate ourselves with Jesus, we raise ourselves up to the level of God, and that's a big no-no.  The #1 rule of theism, and particularly monotheism, is that we are not God.  There's God, and there's us, but we are not one and the same.  This is supposed to keep us humble and obedient to God's will.  Otherwise, if we're equal to God, we get to make up our own morality.... or do we?

The assumption here is that equating ourselves with God gives rise to polytheism, and that each of us can have individual claims to make mini-universes with our own choice of moral standards.  But if we become truly "one" with God, then we take on the mind of God and become indistinguishable from God.  Therefore, God's desires become our own desires, not at all in conflict with "the rest of God" if you will.

But then we circle back to the "only-begotten" part above, which ensrues we do not try to identify ourselves with Jesus.  Which is ironic, since the very purpose of the Christian life is to "become another Christ", to "be Christ's hands and feet in the world". We actually ARE called to live up to the same identity as belongs to Christ, but I guess the fear is that again, we won't be able to do so in humility.

Continuing with the creed, we recite: "For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, and was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man."  Most of this statement is not problematic, except that Jesus's very purpose is to somehow "save" us, which of course begs the question - from what? As well as - why in the following manner?: "He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried."  Circling back to his incarnation from the "Virgin Mary", we have to ask - why did Mary have to be a virgin?  Why couldn't Jesus's birth be just as miraculous even if he had maternal siblings?  Of course, the answer is that virgin births are a common occurrence in mythologies of larger-than-life personalities.  This is basically here to highlight - yet again - the uniqueness of Jesus and his incomparable identity.

Next, we recite that: "He rose on the third day, according to the Scriptures"  This is where the rubber hits the road, so to speak.  This is a claim that is supposed to be historically verifiable, or at least there ought to be evidence suggesting as much.  Apologists say that if this is true, everything else (in the creed) is therefore true.  I'm not so sure.  We can potentially "proove" that Jesus "was raised" from the dead, but it wouldn't prove if it was by His own power or that of God (the Father, let's say).  Furthermore, the Jewish people disagree that Jesus fulfills "the Scriptures" because only some of the prophesies of the Hebrew Bible came true through Jesus, while others did not, and still certain things about Him go contrary to standard Jewish understandings of righteousness.  If anything, more modern Christians who already believe in Jesus as Savior have read these associations back into the Scriptures to make the story fit.

We continue: "He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and He is coming again with glory, to judge the living and the dead, and of His kingdom will have no end."  This is all of course speculation, so the creed is asking us to believe all of this "because we said so".  My question is - how much of the content of the creed is actually helping us follow Jesus?  Live according to His teachings?  It wasn't until Pope John Paul the Great added the Luminous Mysteries to the Rosary that Catholics started reflecting more systematically on His actual teachings in that devotion.  Until then, it was all about who Jesus allegedly was, and what happened to Him, but not so much the actual teachings He wanted us to internalize... the teachings that got him killed in the first place!  It was His teachings about how we ought to live that were so dangerous, that He refused to back up on, that He died defending.  He knew there was life in His words.  He knew He spoke the Truth.  And His followers have all but stifled the very Truth He died for in order to elevate Him to Godhood so we can satisfy ourselves by merely "worshipping" Jesus without really doing what He taught.

So yeah, this part of the Creed about Jesus I cannot say I actually believe verbatim the way the Church wants me to believe. The Creed continues about the Holy Spirit: 

"And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and Creator of Life, Who proceeds from the Father, Together with the Father and the Son He is worshiped and glorified; He spoke through the prophets."  Now interestingly, here it is the Holy Spirit (of God) Who is identified as "Creator of Life", even though we usually think of that role as belonging to the Father.  But no matter.  The fact that He spoke through the prophets begs the question - has the Holy Spirit stopped speaking through prophets?  Are we to believe that there are no more prophets being called forth?  That's what Muslims claim about Mohammad.  The Baha'i claim that about Baha'ullah. Refusing to acknowledge future prophets is a tactic to try to solidify one's claim of control over the faith community.  If there's no more prophets, there can be no more insights or changes made.  That is contrary to life and nature itself.  Life is change.  Nature survives on the basis of cyclical change.  Of course there needs to be ongoing change, growth... life.  And it continues to come from the Holy Spirit.  

I believe that it is here that the mystics come in, but so few people are interested in what is said because honestly, mystics mostly just remind people of what's already been established but long forgotten.  It's too hard to discern the nuances of the spiritual life.  It's much easier to stick with a literal mythology and legalistic framework where we do as we're told and don't have to think too hard about anythin.