Cleaning up our messes.
I grew up in a branch of Christianity that valued certainty and constantly left me questioning my own. Everyone around me seemed so damned sure of everything, and the sermons told me I could be that way too if I just believed the right things. Needless to say, I put a lot of cosmic-level stress on my middle school self. I was baptized not once but twice — just in case the big man upstairs missed the first one or I had done it wrong. I asked my friends at school whether they knew Jesus, as uncomfortable as it made me. While most kids my age were simply trying to be cool or fit in, I was reading The Case for Christ again to make sure I knew what to say when someone (read: the devil) inevitably tried to convince me God wasn’t real.
My church believed the Bible was the one true word of God, inerrant and infallible (yes, there is a difference and yes, I have read more than one book on it.) Essentially, we believed the Bible was 100% true, period, next question. We knew it was true because Bible scholars had worked it all out for us. Systematic theology: the orderly, rational, and coherent account of the doctrines of the Christian faith.
Systematic theology tickled my analytical brain. We can simply reason our way to the divine! This was fantastic news, as I loved thinking and didn’t care much for prayer or contemplation. If I could learn how it all fit together, I would be just as certain as others around me. I couldn’t yet see the hubris of reasoning my way to the divine.
I would later come to learn I grew up in an evangelical church, and I was in fact an award-winning evangelical Christian. I grew up in youth group, went to a Christian school, and even worked for a church leading music for a year. I taught junior high students parables about the kingdom of heaven with absolutely zero spiritual training of my own to speak of. The standout jewel in my evangelical crown was inviting my then-girlfriend to church on Easter Sunday where she stood up and accepted Jesus as her lord and savior. The emotional manipulation and twisted logic I implemented to convince her to come along are among my deepest regrets to this day. I was an evangelical who didn’t even realize he was an evangelical until it was too late and the damage had been done.
Many sage voices have already laid out the framework of Christian deconstruction: Richard Rohr, Michael Gungor, Peter Rollins, and the late Rachel Held Evans, to name a few. To flesh out my own deconstruction story here would only serve to wander the corridors and pathways they have already so eloquently mapped out. Suffice it to say that once the linchpin is removed there is no going back. The tower collapses on itself.
Nobody warned me about the deep sense of alienation that comes along with walking away from a faith tradition — even one as backward as evangelical christianity. By walking away, I’d given up my community and lost a deep sense of grounding, direction, and purpose. Losing the only language I had to describe the most important truths about the world depressed me most of all. Sin, redemption, forgiveness, salvation — all empty words now that I saw how much pain and division they caused. I couldn’t find an alternative — phrases like “everything happens for a reason” and mantras like “try to be a good person” didn’t cut it. They lacked the fortitude necessary to speak about the depth of what has gone wrong in the human condition, and the incomprehensible beauty we have the potential to become.
Over the years this alienation led to myriad expressions of emotion. Anger. Rejection. Blasé. Avoidance. Eventually, even acceptance. I was a spiritual nomad of sorts for the better part of my twenties. My interest in questions of spiritual significance never went away, yet it often sat shotgun to questions about career, or direction. Although I would almost always rather have conversations about what the hell we’re all doing here on this rock floating in space than about work or politics, I rarely broached those spiritual questions with others for almost ten years.
Then one day I picked up a book on Vipassana meditation, Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana. It turned my entire perspective of spirituality on its head. The book itself is nothing more than an instruction manual for the spiritual practice of mindfulness. It doesn’t outline Buddhist philosophy or dive into theory. It doesn’t prescribe a result one should expect from the practice, but simply outlines how to practice. But anyone who’s practiced anything knows growth is the inevitable side effect of practice.
I realized I’d never truly practiced anything spiritual — not as a verb at least. I’m a practical person, and spiritual practices had never seemed to cultivate anything useful particularly quickly, if at all. Growing up, I would experience a wave of guilt every so often due to my lack of spiritual devotion and swear to read my bible every day from there on out. It never stuck for more than a week or two. Nobody had told me that a spiritual practice was not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. For the first time, I had language: “Meditation is a living activity, an inherently experiential activity,” Gunaratana explained. “It’s up to you to take the first few steps on the road to the discovery of who you are and what it all means.”
I read the entire book in a single evening, and began my meditation practice the following morning. I have no rational explanation, something just clicked. Something in Gunarantana’s simple diagnosis of the human experience rang true in the deepest parts of my being.
“Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time, but it always comes back — usually when you least expect it. There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending your whole life just barely getting by. You are a mess. And you know it. But you hide it beautifully. Meanwhile, way down under all that, you just know there has got to be some other way to live, some better way to look at the world, some way to touch life more fully.”
Yes. That is it exactly. The invitation at the end of the first chapter was like a refreshing spiritual shower for my soul: “There is only one way you will ever know if meditation is worth the effort. Learn to do it right, and do it. See for yourself.” Of course! How else could such a mystical experience of the divine work? I’d spent my twenties trying to convince myself the problem was practical, but realized it is in fact spiritual. The problem has everything to do with the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves. In a one-night transformation, I changed the course of my life forever.
The whole experience was hauntingly familiar, like a ghost of a memory. An invitation into a new way of seeing the world? A way to touch life more fully? I’d heard these ideas before. Buried under heaps of belief and systematic theology, I still recognized the pearl of wisdom I’d unknowingly been carrying with me for years. The invitation to wake up and come alive is always there, right in front of us. All we have to do is accept the gift and see for ourselves.
As my meditation practice deepened, I began to draw connections between the reality I was becoming experientially aware of and the reality described by a Jewish rabbi two thousand years ago. I did not seek out any transformation, but suddenly Jesus’ teachings about a way of being alive that is so indescribably liberating you would be a fool not to drop everything and pursue it hit me like it was the first time. I’d been raised with a version of Christianity that handed me a way of living life and informed me that it would change everything. I had rediscovered a Jesus who said quite the opposite. If you are living in a way that doesn’t absolutely enrapture you and instill meaning to the core of your being, you’re missing it.
It feels incredibly foreign to reference the Bible in my writing again, but this is the path of reentry. The first book of Kings in the Old Testament tells a story of the prophet Elijah going on a quest to hear the voice of God. He travels forty days and forty nights, eating only once, and eventually arrives at a holy mountain. There, an angel appears and tells him to stand out on the side of the mountain, for Yahweh is about to pass by.
“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper…”
It is only when you learn to sit still that you become able to hear the voice of the One. And while incredibly simple, sitting still seems to be one of the most difficult things for us humans to do.
I had no intention of picking up the pieces of a broken, hurtful, and certain faith I had left behind. What I found was that reentry to deep spiritual tradition snuck up on me. Reclaiming the language, stories, teachings, and wisdom of an ancient Christian mysticism appears to be the work in front of me. It is work I didn’t choose, but unfinished business is calling me back.
Perhaps the divine calling of humans is simply to finish what we start, and to clean up our messes.
