I'm walking home from daily Mass, which I do not attend daily but appreciate having available. I'm reflecting on the readings and asking myself if I'm going to be able to reenter this space again after my faith deconstruction. I want to. I long for it, actually. The secular worldview, while enormously helpful in establishing how my weaknesses negatively influenced my previous religious world-view, was found wanting and unsatisfying. It didn't take too terribly long for me to use my neurodivergent superpower of "but-what-about-ism" to start questioning the very secular post-Christian influencers who helped me realize the God I was taught in mainstream religion was a fabrication of "the patriarchy". Everything they said about THAT god was true; he didn't exist.
But what about having a different understanding of God? - I thought. What about the fact that while the Bible's god is indeed a tyrant when read literally, there is this thing called poetry...
I completely agreed with these anti-Christian influencers when it came to dismantling a literalist view of God. But they were clearly throwing out the proverbial baby with the religious bathwater. They went from one extreme to the other. They still held on to a literal view of the Bible and Christianity - and that's precisely why they rejected it!
I never thought of myself as having abandoned spirituality when I left the church a couple of years ago. Over time, I felt more and more resonance with Daoism (you may have seen it spelled as Taoism). There was no question in my mind that Daoism = wisdom for life. There's nothing to "believe" or take on blind faith. Daoism cannot be disproven because it doesn't make any supernatural claims. At least not the philosophical Daoism that has trickled into the West. I started reading the Dao De Jing as scripture. I could reflect on a passage and see how it applies to my life. I could learn from it. I could slowly start to accept things about life that previously gave me trouble.
But eventually I realized something was missing from a strictly philosophically Daoist worldview: God. Dao is not a personal or even personified being to whom I could relate. Oh, I tried talking to Dao. I tried to make the equivocation in my mind. Dao=God. But just because I said so didn't make it ring true in my heart or mind.
Then my daughter suddenly got incredibly ill. And my Daoist worldview could only offer me a disinterested sense of resignation. It is what it is. What are you gonna do? No! I couldn't accept that. There HAD to be something I could do. I remembered that in the past, in my religious days, I would've prayed to God - for healing, for strength, for wisdom - something!
So I accepted - in true Daoist fashion - the limitations of my Daoist worldview. I thought - it may very well be an illusion, but if it's an illusion that can grant me peace of mind, then it's an illusion I want to embrace. And I prayed.
My faith has not miraculously come back overnight. I'm still very much in the early stages of reconstructing my Christianity. But at this point, I do know that is where I'm headed - back into Christianity, but this time with a mature spirituality.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things" (verse 11). This rings so true for me. When I was a spiritual child, I understood the Christian faith as children do. I believed in it on a literal level. But now that I've become a fully mature adult, it's time to put away childish notions that have already been disproven by science, or that do not align with the idea of a balanced universe or a loving Creator.
And so, as I walked home from daily Mass the other day and wondered how my faith may look practically if I am no longer beholden to a literal interpretation of the Christian story?
Eckhart Tolle's words provided the answer. What our senses can perceive - these are mere forms. They do not hold our essence. Our bodies - mere forms. This is why death is not the end - we are not our bodies. I am not interested in defending my slowly evolving understanding of an allegorical Christian worldview. Apologetics implies head knowledge, facts, proofs, right and wrong. None of that matters to me any more. I am finished trying to optimize every facet of my life, my faith included.
Words are just another example of forms. Words are not the things they represent. Words can be translated, interpreted, even evolve over time. Therefore, the words of the Creed, for instance, are beside the point. I can recite them if I want to participate in communal worship. I do not have to let my rigid thinking lock me into an either-or scenario where I must either agree with every literal dogma presented in the Creed, or abandon it altogether and refuse its recitation (something I did do at one point of my evolving faith). They're just words. They do not speak to my faith in God, nor to my relationship with God, nor to God's reality.
Words are words, and bodies are bodies. They are here today, gone tomorrow. What remains is the spirit behind them. That's why Jesus talked about the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. Paul again, in 2 Corinthians talks about Christians having been made "competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."
The Spirit will not be contained in mere words. The Holy Spirit will not be limited to mere vocabulary. God Who is Spirit can never be understood by way of language.
The words are just traditions, like everything else - vestments, feast days, candles and incense, bread and wine, prayer beads and mantillas - words are sacramentals. They can be used to draw us closer to God, but they can just as easily be used to build a wall around us, blocking God's presence from being felt.
I believe the reason we were given the command against idols in Exodus 20:4 was to help us remember that God cannot be grasped. "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below." Words are a human invention. Nature exists in perfect balance without a single human word. Oh, there's the Christian sense of Jesus being the Word of God, but notice it's the entirety of the person of Jesus that is this "word". It's not his name that we mean when we refer to Him as "the Word". After the resurrected Jesus was encountered by Mary, who in her joyful relief and excitement attempted to grab onto Him, Jesus said: "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father (John 20:17). How much more true is it that we ought not to cling to mere words about Jesus, or God.
Again and again we are reminded that God simply is. Naming God, describing God, defining God - all futile. Yet we try over and over to claim that we - our denomination, our religion, our interpretation - we have "the truth" about God.
So again, I can live with those words of the Creed, or the words of the homily that at first rubs me the wrong way. The priest, after all, is just another form, doing his best (let's hope) to make sense of the Ultimate Reality - a tall order indeed. Those words are there for the same reason as the stained glass, the reliefs, the statues, the icons. Those words are there for the same reason a week is 7 days, or that we come together to worship on Sundays. Those words are there for the same reason all of these words refer to the same Source of All: Dios, Bóg, Deus, Gott, Allah, Bhagvan (Hindi), Shen (Chinese), Devaha (Sanskrit), Nkulunkulu (Zulu), Elohim (Hebrew), God. The word is not God.
The word is not God. Words are not God. Words cannot, therefore, express Who or What God actually is. Only Silence and Stillness and Solitude can do that. And that can be done within a Christian context. I am going back to the cloak of Christianity for the incidentals. For the traditions. For the culture and community. I am not going back to Christianity for God. There's no need. God does not belong to Christianity. God is all in all. There is nowhere I can hide where God would not be.
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” – Psalm 139:7-10
“Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.'” – Isaiah 30:21
“And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” – Matthew 28:20
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