“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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I have always relished philosophical discussions about the nature of God and I have spent a lifetime pondering human conceptions of the divine. If we have a special place in the universe, or are endowed with a unique purpose by a creator, then our ability to reason is one of the things that sets us apart. What good are our beliefs if they can’t stand up to scrutiny? Knowledge and discernment come from having the courage to question our convictions. I say, submit your religious beliefs to the fire of scrutiny. Burn away what is merely convention and the ultimate truth will emerge as polished gold. I have striven to raise my children with this same level of honesty, courage and sensitivity.
I’ve changed a lot since high school, when I ardently embraced Christianity as a born-again acolyte. One of my former Young Life leaders recently asked me about my current faith and ideas about God. I get that question periodically from old friends so I thought it was time to provide a thoughtful answer.
While I am an innately spiritual individual, I am not afraid to admit that many bad concepts pervade our religious traditions, or to acknowledge the inconsistencies and, in some cases, outright atrocities in our holy books. Not only our scientific knowledge, but also our political, social and moral sensibilities have evolved considerably since these books were written. In addition, most modern religions are burdened by centuries of dogma that detract from the core insight and guidance of their founders. While they uphold fundamental virtues and have led many people to do good deeds, in some cases they have become more of a hindrance than an aid to attaining true spiritual insight.
Thus for many years my spiritual quest has involved un-learning as much as learning: stripping away centuries of ideas and traditions to uncover the bare essence of divinity, the nuggets of truth that motivated enlightened individuals to share their experiences in the first place. Rituals, sacraments, liturgies, hymns and volumes of ecclesiastical literature were all designed to help us find the way, but in most cases their meaning has been lost or diluted by convention.
When it comes to Christianity, I am most interested in the authentic words and spiritual teachings of Jesus. Unfortunately, he didn’t write down his sermons, delivered in Aramaic, or if he did they weren’t preserved. The Gospels were written decades after his death, in Greek, and by that time the early church had it’s own interpretation and evangelical agenda—from St. Paul’s zealous attempts to guide the early church to the pervasive institutions of the present day. If you read the Gospels with some discernment, however, you can still detect the genuine message and spirit of what Jesus stood for.
Look closely and without preconceptions and you will see that Jesus’ views are in harmony with the supreme teachings of all the great religions, from the Upanishads to the Tao to the Buddhist sutras to the words of the Zen and Sufi masters.
When Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God, I don’t think he was referring to some future heavenly state or foreseeing an apocalyptic vision. He was talking about a state of being, a way of living in harmony with the way things are, right now. Jesus also put the scriptures in perspective. He cast aside the ancient precepts of the Torah and the tedious legal jargon of ancient Judaism. He put a more loving, tolerant face on the provincial Yahweh of the Old Testament. And he taught us not to equate spirituality with dogma, or belief in a set of doctrines.
It is clear to me through much study that the mystical traditions of the world converge upon a common reality that transcends words and thoughts. Spiritual experience is a natural propensity of the human mind, but we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. It resides within us and is accessible to everyone. Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened to you.
Clearly Jesus was aware of this fundamental truth. And while some Christian sects and denominations have buried it, others have helped it to flower, such as the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages and some modern theologians like Master Eckhart and Richard Rohr. Introspection and meditation lead us to this fundamental awareness. We apprehend God’s presence by looking within, quieting the mind and becoming one with the groundless source of being.
All of our ideas about God and the nature of existence ultimately arise from the mind. To me this simple truth is at the heart of spirituality. And while we can argue endlessly about whether one religion is better than another, the fact is that some religious traditions acquaint us with this central truth better than others. There are pearls of wisdom in the Bible, to be sure, but when it comes to meditation and direct spiritual insight, the teachings of Buddha, Shankara, Nagarjuna, Lao Tzu and many others far surpass anything we find in the Judeo Christian canon. Jesus echoed their wisdom with his emphasis on personal transformation and his insistence that God can be found in the still, small voice inside of us. That’s why he talked about the natural spirituality of children, saying that to know God you must become like a child. Children naturally embody the divine here and now.
We feel God’s presence in proportion to our openness, and (for me anyway), most of the rituals and sacraments of the modern church stand in the way of that simple truth. The luminous, the compassionate, the treasure buried in the field, the pearl of great price—these allegories point to the overwhelming presence of a God who is here all the time, right beneath our feet. We don’t need to earn this state of being. It is already ours and, if anything, most of us lose it as we grow up. As Jesus said, children don’t need to “enter” the Kingdom of God. They are already in it.
This self-evident truth is often clouded by the unreasonable demands of modern religions and their elaborate systems of belief, some of which are clearly untenable. How can we believe in a rational God who demands us to hold irrational tenets? Must we posit a supernatural world? Isn’t it enough to believe that Jesus was a man who transformed himself and left great examples and teachings? Must we also believe that he was the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth in clouds of glory? Must we accept the abhorrent concept of Original Sin and the exclusionary idea that only certain individuals are saved? Such dogma takes what is good and pure in Christianity – the example of Jesus – and places it forever out of reach. Becoming like Jesus becomes impossible.
I don’t think Life can be reduced to its material constituents or that consciousness can be explained as a series of chemical reactions. However, we can’t ever really know the ultimate nature of reality due to one inescapable fact: read, ponder, and argue as we may, any statement about absolute truth only reflects our puny human conceptions. All of our noblest ideas are bounded by what we can see, measure, and understand. One of these conceptions that we must overcome is the illusion of “self” which encourages a duality between us and everything else and prevents us from contemplating the nature of consciousness, from which all of our ideas about God arise.
I’ve strayed towards Eastern philosophy because it offers clear guidelines about the nature of the mind and the path to spiritual fulfillment through simple meditation and contemplation. The teachings of the Buddha don’t require a leap of faith or acceptance of inscrutable doctrine or belief in the unknown. They simply point the way to a rational exploration of the nature of consciousness—an exploration, I might add, that is in accord with current thinking in psychology, neuroscience, and our honest perceptions of the world around us. They describe the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and body in a way that can be validated by direct experience.
For me, prayer doesn’t involve beseeching the attention of an external deity. It is a personal transformation guided by liberation from the illusion of self. It begins not with sin, but with serenity. We are naturally in a state of grace and we can all apprehend this clear state of awareness, uncluttered by dogma, transcending thought. Meditation not only acquaints us with the groundless source of being. It is also a very practical method of cultivating awareness and refining our attention.
My simple faith in the God of popular Christianity, which characterized my high school and early college years, has expanded and blossomed. I passed through a dark and nihilistic phase in my twenties but I have arrived on the other side with a meaningful and honest worldview—and a fulfilling spiritual life as well. Abandoning “religion” was step one. Understanding “faith” was step two: not a virtue, but a misguided attempt to justify nonsensical arguments. Faith runs counter to honest intellectual inquiry because it requires no justification and allows no argument. In what other area of human discourse do we permit such nonsense?
My spiritual life is a continuum. And while there have been plenty of reversals and a few outright denials along the way, I can trace an unbroken path to the present. Today I’m agnostic, if pushed, with little need for faith and a low tolerance for nonsense. The kid from Young Life camp is still here and I don’t try to negate any of the experiences that have made me who I am. Most of all, I am untroubled in my soul. I find beauty in simple things and I feel God as a part of me, every day. As the great American poet Wallace Stevens said:
The bird which sings in the palm sings a human song. It wakes me to a world which is enough.
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Bibliography
While I did not want to interrupt the flow of this narrative with citations and footnotes, influential sources include the following:
Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus
Sam Harris, The End of Faith
Matthiew Ricard, The Monk and the Philosopher
Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems
Alan Wallace, Mediations of a Buddhist Skeptic
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: The Transcendentalist
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Nagarjuna, Seventy Verses on Emptiness
The New American Standard Bible
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