I’m back to being primarily preoccupied with Christianity, as I navigate a difficult season. I may be an “elephantist,” but I must admit, I feel like a Christian one. And when I am in need, Christianity is where I want to go.

One of the things I find Christianity to be particularly keen about is the concept of divine relatedness — the principle of an essentially relational universe, and its implications. How cosmic relationality inflects the process of spiritual development. How it establishes the nature of groups. Interpersonal relationships. Relationship with self, etc.

Thinking about Christian relatedness recently, a story came to mind from the life of Catherine of Siena, which her hagiographer Raimundo of Capua says he got directly from her (and which I got from Catherine of Siena, by Sigrid Undset). Be advised: it’s kind of a viscerally intense story, but I think the underlying theme is pretty profound.

Catherine was caring for a woman named Andrea who was severely afflicted with cancer. A sore from the cancer had effectively consumed one of Andrea’s breasts entirely, and it reportedly gave off such a strong smell that visitors often pinched their noses when they came to visit her. Out of a commitment to being a visible instrument of God’s mercy — that is, God’s full, open relatedness — Catherine resisted every impulse to show any reaction in Andrea’s presence, but the smell from the sore became so strong that she found it hard to control the involuntary reactions of her stomach.

So during one visit, when she was sure she was going to be sick, instead of turning away Catherine pressed her face up against the sore on the woman’s body and inhaled deeply. According to the story, Andrea was initially appreciative of Catherine’s dedication, but as time went by she was taken by the idea that Catherine could only be so self-sacrificial if, in the rest of her life, she was “seeking pleasure in shameful ways,” and so Andrea began to accuse her of immoral behavior — apparently vociferously enough that other people around started to accuse her too. Catherine’s friends discouraged her from continuing to minister to such a bitter person, but Catherine insisted, and eventually Andrea softened again, and she expressed great, tearful gratitude for Catherine’s help.

All along, though, Catherine continued to find the woman’s condition difficult, and she continued to wrestle with her own resistance. On another visit, she collected pus from the sore into a bowl of water that she had been using to salve the wound — and, according to Raimundo who said this was Catherine’s direct confession to him — and mind you, this is the particularly intense part — she proclaimed, “By the Life of the Almighty, by the beloved Bridegroom of my soul, you shall receive in your stomach what you feel such fear of” — and then she drank the water.

After that, she said her revulsion went away, and she was able to minister to Andrea without further concern.

This is a heck of a thing for you to be reading on Sunday. (Or whenever you are reading it.) To a modern sensibility, it might be a lot to take in. There often seems to be an undercurrent of masochism in old-school Christianity — I’m not sure how much of it’s attributable simply to differences in context and how much it’s due to genuine spiritual distortions from the past — but either way, I feel like you can sense some of that vibe here.

Also, on some level, this is not just an uncomfortable story; it’s also an odd story. Imagine being in a hospital and having a nurse behave this way. Smelling the patient’s breast, and so on. What should we expect Andrea to have felt? Isn’t she being a little objectified?

We could litigate these events through complex lenses of history, sociology, and cultural theology. We could litigate them through a psychological model of an ideal of grace trying to express itself through imperfect humanity. But I’m not going to do any of that here. Partly it’s because I find it easy to compartmentalize all of this as “long ago,” and partly it’s because, to me, there is such a clear message. To me, the ostensible meaning of the story is also the deep meaning of the story: Catherine was situated beside a woman at a genuine nadir of human suffering, and she was interpreting God’s open, relational mercy. She wanted to act in a way that she believed was consistent with how God is disposed toward every one of us — willing to ford any gap at all for the sake of connection and for the sake of showing us tenderness.

I’ve been re-reading Howard Storm’s My Descent Into Death, about his difficult near-death experience, his rescue by Jesus, and the utter transformation of his life after returning to his body. At one point he says, simply, “God wants to draw us to heaven through love.”

This is an essential Christian testimony about reality. Catherine believed it. When she ministered to Andrea, she wanted to be a human example of a divine fact. She took the lengths she could to be that instrument of grace. And across any remaining human failure to see Andrea in the fullest, most self-sovereign light, divine contact was made. Andrea received.

In that light, I think this story is beautiful. And incredibly apt to the Christian message. This world can be miry. Sometimes it feels like it’s getting more miry all the time. We shouldn’t wallow in the mire of life, but we shouldn’t sweep it under the rug, either.

The deepest invitation is neither to wallow nor to avoid, but to take it all as it comes, with surrender, to bring our best effort to what comes — and do both of these in the light of a sublime divine perfection that is attempting to reach us wherever we are — at all times — out of a nearly desperate love for us.

At our worst moments, it could be exactly a story about this kind of entrance of grace into the most visceral of human conditions that provides us comfort. In our ways, don’t we all have our deep sores? Isn’t it here that God wants to break in, with all of God’s sublimity and perfection — just to participate?

This is the essential archetypal frame we’re offered. And it’s clear to me it’s meant not just to comfort us, but to allow us to pull a genuine signal from the noise.

Once a story like this — plainly, another archetypal rendering of the cross — leads you to pull a genuine signal from the noise, you are not living in a cushion of fictionalized, palliative comfort. You’re living with one of the most authentic perceptions of human life that is available.

That’s the premise. And I find it profoundly moving, and it seems to me to be quite real.

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Last week, I mentioned a conversation in which a friend asked me if Jesus might have been made up, and I explained why I think this is unlikely. But, of course, this just covers the easier argument to dismiss.

Most scholars agree that there was a historical Jesus. The more often debated issue is who that historical Jesus really was. Is it possible that various tissues of myth and messianic expectation, floating thickly in the air of first-century Judea, got attached to a comparatively minor Galilean preacher, vaulting him way out of his league into the status as the son of God?

To our common way of thinking about things, it may seem easiest to suppose that a comparatively mundane story, something more consistent with our everyday observations, got elaborated into something much more extraordinary. But when you really look at the evidence, I’m not sure how easy it is to make this case.

An immense field of scholarship exists around this topic, but maybe it’s possible to make a compelling point with a few quick strokes:

I think there’s little doubt that there are embellishments in the Gospel narratives. A few that stand out to me are the statement in Matthew that Joseph and Mary originally lived in Bethlehem, and the census in Luke that sends Mary and Joseph back to Bethlehem, because it’s Joseph’s ancestral city.

I think these beats are probably not historical. The census in particular is widely regarded as implausible from economic and administrative perspectives, and Joseph and Mary’s flight into Egypt in Matthew is also unlikely — though it is conveniently reminiscent of Moses and the “exodus” narrative. There’s a good chance these bits were written to underscore Jesus’ relationship to King David and, especially in Matthew, to compare him to other Jewish leaders who were close to God, and to underwrite the extent to which Jesus appears to have fulfilled Jewish prophecy.

Also, though, these examples, of themselves, don’t speak particularly against the thesis that Jesus was much as he appears to be in the stories. There’s a difference between altering biographical details around a person, for the sake of a theological point, and fictionalizing the person outright.

If we go further, though, we do find evidence of deeper elaboration — or at least differing portrayals. You could say, for instance, that Mark, put to writing around 70 CE, forty or so years after the crucifixion, and generally believed to be the earliest gospel, has a lower Christology than the later John, which was probably written in the 90s — or sixty years after the crucifixion. Mark’s account features a Jesus who is prone to indignation; who performs fewer miracles in his hometown, because of unbelief; who says no one but the Father knows when “the day or hour” will come. Also, it’s widely thought that the earliest versions of Mark ended with the empty tomb and the announcement of the resurrection, without an actual appearance of the risen Jesus.

Meanwhile, in the gospel of John, Jesus is the Logos incarnate, having been with God since the beginning of creation, then showing up on earth to walk with us, serenely, for the briefest of times.

Is there, perhaps, a suggestion of a vector here, where the Christ story becomes more cosmic as time passes? And if so, what happens if you trace it the other way? Back toward the origin, how much of that mythical import gets shed before you arrive at historical events?

It seems clear to me, first, that it’s just impossible to know for sure — through a rigorous historical-critical process, anyway. But even if you trace this “vector” back to the origin, you don’t seem to get a whole lot of reduction.

For one thing, the progression from Mark to John is elevating, but Mark’s Jesus is still pretty extraordinary. Jesus still performs miracles, he still teaches and heals, he still dies and is raised from the dead.

And for another, Paul uses a relatively high Christology even earlier than Mark — in his letter to the Philippians, for instance, dated in the early 60s, when he recites a “Jesus hymn” that reads in part (in NIV translation below):

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

So, this explicitly exalted version of Jesus appears to have existed in Paul’s lifetime, and before Mark’s gospel was written down. Meanwhile, in 1 Thessalonians, usually regarded as the earliest letter of Paul’s we have, probably written around 50 CE, Paul refers to Jesus as God’s “Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead . . . who rescues us from the coming wrath” (NIV). And at least a basic death-and-resurrection tradition probably circulated earlier than this. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul recites a basic message he has received, that Jesus died for “our sins,” was buried, was raised, and appeared to Cephas (Peter) and “the twelve,” and numerous other followers, and many scholars date this essential formula to within the first few years of the crucifixion.

If a myth about a “son of God” got attached to a minor Galilean preacher, it doesn’t appear to have been attached with a great deal of retrospect. It seems clear that an exalted Christology was circulating — in circles where people knew the people who knew Jesus. Paul, spreading high claims, says he himself met with Cephas (Peter) and James, whom he calls the “Lord’s brother,” for instance. And these are just the firmest data points we have.

There may still have been a range of interpretations of Jesus’ story — in fact, there almost certainly was. But it doesn’t really look like ambient myths got attached to a person particularly unlike them. It looks much more like people who had known Jesus came very quickly to think he had a uniquely exalted relationship with God — and said so.

Does that mean we have to see Jesus the way they did? Not necessarily. But I think it pushes hard against the most cynical interpretations. It doesn’t seem possible to erase Jesus, and the more ordinary you try to make him, the more bizarre his exaltation becomes.

And then, there is always the question: Why not see Jesus the way they did?

Go and see for yourself. Run the strongest naturalistic hypothesis hard against the evidence. I think the more you look into it, the more the attempt to reduce the events starts to work against itself.

Jesus was here. And by even the nearest accounts he was extraordinary.

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Everything depends on a term you’ve never heard of.

Why have you never heard of the term that everything depends on? Because I’ve made up this term, and I’m tossing it around. The term is ortho-antilipsis. It’s a play on terms like orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Orthodoxy is, literally, “right opinion” or “right belief,” and orthopraxy is “right practice.” By extension, ortho-antilipsis is “right taking hold” (as of a concept), “right apprehension,” or “right seeing.”

Do we need a new term for this, when we’ve got words like “clarity,” “wisdom,” and “perspicacity”? Maybe not. But I like the term ortho-antilipsis because it gives the idea a sort of institutional heft. It resists the kind of brisk admission that turns into dismissal — Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course. Ortho-antilipsis has a way of sitting on the desk, like a paperweight.

Why does ortho-antilipsis matter? Because it’s the mediator of everything else. More specifically, it’s the mediator of spiritual pursuit at four levels (personal, interpersonal, systemic, and cosmic) — which is the focus of the conversation here — and, even more specifically, it is the mediator of Christianity becoming a whole, viable, perhaps even universal spiritual practice today.

If you want healthy spiritual formation, at any level, you have to be assiduously thinking about “right seeing,” because you have to be assiduously thinking about what’s real, and the level at which it is real. This is true in any spiritual practice, but it stands out to me as especially true in Christian practice — which is, if I had to ruthlessly pick, where I would most easily locate my spiritual heart and home.

One of the most powerful premises offered by Christianity, which I believe is directly generalizable to all spiritual practice, is that the ground of reality is absolutely awake and participatory; that it evinces a certain flavor, character, and structure; and that its human progeny are usually, at best, only loosely calibrated with this essential character.

And, of course, Christianity further anchors itself in the example of Jesus, which really develops the idea that conscious reality has a vibe. Not only does ultimate reality assert itself in ways that we can engage personally, and not only is this reality personal itself — so that we can talk to It, thank It, praise It, rage at It, ask It to guide us, teach us, and help us — but also this personal aspect can be identified in the divine example of Christ. It’s absolute, but it’s also that personal.

This means that the foundational spiritual practice is not just an act of self-creation or self-abnegation; it’s an act trying to tune in to a rich and multi-layered living reality. We are not just building things; we are learning how to encounter something — how to locate a river, how to flow with it, and how to tap into its expression in ourselves, so that it will flow most effectively through us.

The underlying assumption is that there is something real to be seen, but that we don’t easily see exactly what it is. The thing that is sought is real, powerful, subtle, complex, absolute and, paradoxically, elusive.

To see clearly is a matter of carefully reading and contemplating scripture. It’s a matter of triangulating through a variety of perspectives — theologians, poets, historians. (I’m obviously particularly fond of NDE literature and, particularly recently, of John Burke’s work. I think his “Imagine Heaven Podcast” videos on YouTube do an extraordinary job of trying to illuminate the nature of God and Jesus from near-death testimonies.)

It’s a matter of reading our inner landscapes for our own fullness, gaps, gifts, wounds, perceptions, and projections. It’s a matter of reading, insofar as we can, the terrain of others and the complex dynamics of groups. And it’s a matter of trying to feel, through direct reaching out, the definite and dynamic architecture of a living God.

It’s a process of exposure and receptivity, and a process of discernment. Every form of engagement is a portal through which we can increasingly see the essential reality — often one facet at a time, in a long process of careful inquiry. Throughout, there’s a persistent curiosity about the nature of that reality, which prevents us from fossilizing our concepts around something less than what that reality really is.

This process is essential to the highest aspirations and, surely, to our attempts to put anything about the endeavor into symbols or language.

The test is resonance. Let’s suppose that divine reality evokes a pure, resounding “YES!” from the deepest parts of ourselves. If so, the fluid inquiry is a relentless pursuit of the deepest resonance — not a passing “yes” that suits our momentary likes and dislikes, but the air across the bottle that makes the bottle loudly sing.

It is an iterative process, but it all comes back to how we see. We have to be able to see, to proceed. And to see more clearly is an effort unto itself.

The first one. The essential one. May it not be forgotten.

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Last weekend, I was talking with a friend about taking classes in a Methodist seminary, and they asked me whether I’d explored the idea that Jesus was a mythical character created ex nihilo to dispense the revelations of the Gospel in a series of convenient teaching stories. In fact, I haven’t explored this literature too much, but it’s mainly because I find the counter-argument so persuasive — which became clearer to me as I started to answer this friend, and as I’ve thought about it since.

There’s more than one idea called forth by the notion of a “Christ myth.” The most extreme is the idea that no Jesus existed at all, and that the Gospel was an invention — either by some group of metaphysicians or, more cynically, by the Romans — drawing on pre-existing material for its matrix. The other idea is that the story about a comparatively more ordinary rabbi named Jesus (Yeshua) accumulated greater and greater mythical heft as it was passed around — which is sometimes called a transition from a “low Christology” to a “high Christology.”

I think both of these are worth considering. But the answer I gave to my friend had more to do with the former claim — which I think is easy to reject. The idea that Jesus was rendered out of whole cloth reminded me of amalgamated figures today, like “David J. Temple,” the pseudonym of Mark Gafni and Zak Stein and the “author” of First Principles and First Values, and “Hanzi Freinacht,” who is the persona through which European philosophers Emil Ejner Friis and Daniel P. Görtz speak. Maybe the apostles were some group of folks who did something like this? They cooked up a radical new form of Judaism and, perhaps out of a self-abdicating humility, they posited a fictional Yeshua from Nazareth to bear it?

But when I try to imagine some group of mystics inventing this story — or whoever else may have done the composing — the possibility just dissolves. I think about the love of truth embedded in the Gospel. “Truly, I tell you,” Jesus says again and again. In John, he denounces Satan as the “father of lies.”

I think of the stories of the martyrdom of the aristocratic Perpetua and the enslaved Felicity1 in 203 CE — both willing to die for their faith in Jesus, and seeing that death as a participation in his sacrifice. I think about the apostles who reportedly died for this story.

There’s just no scenario in my mind in which so many people sacrifice so much in service of a fiction where the moral heft of the message and its resulting movement doesn’t collapse because of the original deception. It’s one thing, relatively harmless, to float a “David J. Temple” or a “Hanzi Freinacht,” when the conceit is fairly transparent and inconsequential. But when the illusion itself is a central premise of the endeavor, and you have people dying for the sake of that illusion, the situation becomes morally very different. There seems to me to be a basic cynicism in the foundation of such a scheme — which is evinced nowhere in the gospels and which is explicitly denounced in them frequently. I just don’t see how such a non-cynical architecture, fit to steer whole civilizations, blooms in such cynical soil.

With that in mind, I think we can probably leave well enough alone the idea that the Christ story was a Roman fabrication to pacify first-century Jewish zealots. For one thing, the documentary evidence indicates that a flourishing Jesus movement existed before any plausible trajectory of such a fabrication. And for another — and, to me, more importantly — the idea that the shimmering wisdom of the text was assembled in service of a state cult, for purely political reasons, just doesn’t make any sense at all.

To me, the truth of the Gospel doesn’t plausibly exist without some historical fact of Jesus — and a Jesus very much like the one in the Gospel.

Whoever he was, exactly, I’m sure he was here.

Note: This piece contains mild spoilers for Tenet, Oppenheimer, Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy — and, of course, his adaptation of The Odyssey.

This week, I saw Christopher Nolan’s great and terrible film The Odyssey with a friend. Nolan is one of my favorite filmmakers, and as a work of cinema, I think The Odyssey is a masterpiece. I would recommend it to some, but not all temperaments.

I’m not sure yet whether I recommend it to my own temperament. It’s pretty bleak. I particularly recall the scenes with Polyphemus, the cyclops, which are some of the most existentially unsettling scenes I think I’ve ever seen on film. An immense, disfigured orphan strides into a dark cave, devouring soldiers incidentally, like Goya’s horrible Saturn. When Odysseus and his men wound the creature and escape, its alien wails seem to fill the whole universe.

With Nolan, though, it’s never a totally uninhabitable vision. He regularly threads themes of goodness, nobility, and care through a remarkably stark, often brutalist aesthetic. There’s a lot that could be said about this movie, including about the way that he renders a Greek thematic palette workable for today’s audience by tempering it with quasi-Christian elements.

But one thing that stood out to me was the way Nolan so often meditates on civilization throughout his films. Civil society, its institutions, and especially the covenants and personal commitments that sustain them repeatedly receive his attention. And it’s striking to me how these meditations cut across the typical lines of the American culture war.

His Batman films lay out the vision. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is a victim of violent crime in early childhood who, as an adult, is learning how to most effectively fight the corruption that has marked his life. He considers a vengeful, vigilante-style murder, but he’s fiercely rebuked by his childhood friend Rachel, now a district attorney, who represents the institutional mechanisms that sustain the social order. For Rachel, Bruce’s transgression is not merely his personal choice of violence; it’s his lack of trust in the bones of the system, despite its corruptions — his departure from the cooperative moral enterprise.

Tempted by the film’s villain, Ra’s al Ghul, who believes the entire civic structure needs to be burned down, Bruce emerges as an unconventional advocate for the best of conventional civilization — where good elites, like his father, are philanthropic stewards; where good cops resist “the take”; where due process can arrive at justice; and where ordinary citizens are capable of nobility and charity. It’s this social order that he ends up defending, in his own way — not as it is, but as it could be.

In these films, there are individuals for Batman to rescue, but throughout the trilogy Nolan clearly distinguishes one consistent figure that must be saved: Gotham itself. Gotham is not innocent, but in all of Nolan’s Batman films, its core moral enterprise — its laws, governance, and civic duties, large and small — stands out as a distinct character. More than anything, an ideal civic architecture — both a system and, importantly, a sustaining faith in the system — is the real “damsel” for which Bruce strives and sacrifices.

In the second film, The Dark Knight, the Joker (legendarily played by Heath Ledger) takes another swing at the social contract. The Joker argues that civil society is an inauthentic veneer over an essential chaos, and he uses a web of organized crime and acts of terrorism to crack its ramparts (allowing the existentially horrific Polyphemus to stride in). The film’s essential question is: when chaos seems to be winning, can the forces of social order prevail without corrupting themselves?

In the third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, Ra’s al Ghul’s agents have returned — but this time, they’ve weaponized a populist movement aimed at the wealthy elite. For most of the film, the villain appears to be brutality incarnate: the muscular, merciless Bane. The social structure collapses altogether — the agents of law and order are trapped underground, and the civic institutions are replaced by a disorderly occupation, brutal tribunals, and empty, oppressively patrolled streets.

Nolan himself has repeatedly said that he does not intend his films to be directly allegorical, but he has an unmistakable way of meditating on the zeitgeist simmering at the time of a film’s release. In 2008’s The Dark Knight, the struggle is reminiscent of the global war on terror, with Bruce Wayne even resorting to a Patriot Act-style surveillance program in the third act. And though Nolan and his collaborators began to develop 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises before the Occupy Wall Street movement broke into view, the populist movement weaponized by Ra’s al Ghul’s agents uncannily echoes its sentiments, and the film squarely addresses the issues it raised.

From this perspective, Nolan offers a singular, clarifying, and surprisingly unconventional political voice. In 2008, you wouldn’t have expected a Hollywood director to invite viewers to identify with the predicament faced by the prosecutors of the “war on terror.” Nor, in 2012, might you have expected a Hollywood voice to caution about the ways that legitimate socioeconomic grievances, over-extended, could destabilize the systems we hold most dear. With civilization itself, and its covenants, as his north star, Nolan brings into view perspectives that don’t fit neatly into well-worn partisan categories.

Riffs on the perils that confront civilization appear in Nolan’s other films, especially the more recent ones. In the opening scene of Tenet, an orchestral performance is disrupted by terrorists — high art torn apart by brutishness. In Oppenheimer, it is the fruits of civilized culture themselves that pose the threat: in a time of terrible war, the greatest luminaries of science invent a weapon that can burn the world.

In The Odyssey, then, Nolan returns to the underlying social contract holding everything together, and here it becomes the most explicit of all. It’s “Zeus’s law,” Nolan’s version of the ancient Greek concept of xenia, the conventions of hospitality that bind hosts and guests. For Nolan, these principles are elevated somewhat beyond their Greek context into what I would argue is effectively a Christianized golden rule: do to others as you would have them do to you. But the civilizational message is clear. Goodness and peace are preserved through the commitments that we make, and the self-restraint by which we maintain them. For Nolan, this is a fragile thing keeping chaos at bay — and its fragility is frightening.

In a time of imperial aggression abroad and heated domestic tensions, Nolan offers this cipher: “Zeus’s law” calls us to civility between nations and within nations; it calls us to charity, and it calls us to honor and not abuse one another’s charity. At the end of the film, we learn that Odysseus has committed the foundational sin against Zeus’s law, exploiting the most sacred concept of gift for the sake of waging total war. Like Bruce Wayne, he has been tempted to violate the social order in order to preserve it, and he has succumbed tragically. His ensuing trials have not been accidental; they’ve amounted to an apparently gods-wrought, penitential endeavor, through which he has not been totally redeemed even at the end of the film.

Here is a clear message about order and peace, one that can be interpreted at many levels. By Zeus’s law, Penelope is obliged to entertain her suitors, and the suitors abuse this hospitality by staying for years, consuming without giving, and seeking their own gratification. There’s no clear allegory here: Penelope’s suitors are wealthy, greedy, and unmistakably local brutes. They’re the villains. But in the broader consideration of xenia, I couldn’t help but hear notes of the American immigration debate — the moral duty of hospitality set against questions about reciprocal obligations and the boundaries “hosts” may legitimately draw. It’s a fraught comparison, but watching this film, I was reminded of my feeling that the conventional political lines around this issue — as with many issues — are insufficient.

While the finer points of practice may not be clear, for Nolan an orienting ideal remains in view. It’s the social order that’s at stake — a system of self-restraint, social contracts, and institutions that affords us relative freedom and peace and keeps the forces of chaos at bay.

Do we want a high civilization? If so, what threatens it, within and without, and how do we preserve it in the face of its trials? What are the values and habits that sustain it?

Even as he eschews more on-the-nose political commentary, it seems to me that Nolan substantially informs the political conversation by going beneath its usual surfaces to a deeper level of value. What he values is worth our attention, and his questions are worth asking — especially when they take us out of our typical political frames.

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Note: this post is too long. I am sure people are going to skim it. But maybe you’ll return at some point and consider these five “levers” in greater detail. I really feel like there’s something worth talking about here.

Anyway here goes:

You may know the parable in which four blind men go into a room with an elephant. They come out and tell everybody else what an elephant is like. One says an elephant is like a tree. One says an elephant is like a wall. One says it’s like a snake. The other says it’s like a leaf.

When they hear each other’s differing reports, they fight.

I realize that I am, fundamentally, an “elephantist.” I believe that the seers have seen one elephant, and whenever I study anything spiritual, I am trying to understand the elephant.

Most traditions purport that they are “elephantist,” too — and I think many of them can be. But in my experience, in practice, most spiritual traditions are still a little bit “tree-ist,” or “snake-ist,” or “wall-ist.” A good friend of mine says that participating in a system or a community is often like “cosplaying,” which I think is a perfect way to look at it. Often you’re asked to try on the model you’ve been invited to — honestly, somewhat disingenuously.

This is not wicked. But it is stifling.

Meanwhile, there are all sorts of new ecosystems of practice forming. And from the limited experience I’ve had, it seems to me that many of them are great. Even profound. A genuinely new dispensation is emerging. But also, these new explorations often lack a certain marinated quality and, in my experience, in terms of deep structure, circumspection, and completeness, they’re often reinventing the wheel a little bit.

I think there’s absolutely nothing more important in our era than good forms of “elephantism.” Good forms of elephantism connect us to a larger reality, and in the process they sink deep roots — into people, into interpersonal relationships, into systems and cultures.

(The effect at the macro level is perhaps particularly important. And the macro level is probably particularly important in an era of metacrisis.)

Remaining in a “cosplay” conceit is stifling, and stepping out of it is risky. The common complaint about Universalism, for instance, is that it has too little structure, and that it’s not about anything.

Below are five suggested levers for building a good, new elephantism. Some of them may seem oddly specific, and I am not sure whether they function as a comprehensive, standalone set of tenets for a system of practice. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t?

I chose them because I think they function as particular “jailbreaks” for existing traditions and practices. When a system or practice is lacking something, it seems to me it’s usually lacking one or more of these.

I think the importance of considering each of them can’t be understated. There’s a lot at stake, and it seems to me there could be a lot of goodness on the other side of a little exploration.

1. The individual self is pure awareness (or, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you)

Each of us is in essence a presence, an awareness, which has been variously conditioned by experience. Upon this ground of presence, we build all kinds of structures. Some of these are more hardwired, weight-bearing, and anatomical, and some of them are more artificial, or construct-like, or even just imaginary.

This may sound like an abstract idea, but it’s worth noting that the realization that you are, at core, a presence is pretty immediate. Just take a minute and think about it. The trick is to sustain that awareness more and more as you move through your other experiences. Because being identified as the presence is the key to seeing the various parts of your so-called self in the clearest light.

I would add, somewhat hastily, that since this is taking us to the foundation of the self, then all of the dynamics that build on top of this ground are important, too — including all of the work of depth psychology, and psychotherapy, and what’s considered “soul work.” All of this pertains in this “lever.”

(But in order for it to really be most deeply meaningful, you have to begin with the absolute ground.)

Equally hastily, I should add that it also includes “Atman is Brahman,” or the idea that, at its core, the individual consciousness is the ultimate, universal consciousness. This definitely pertains. And, in my experience, many people interested in this idea are presuming an arrival at this awareness way, way too soon.

Advantages: You can’t understand the structures inside the box, and the conceits involved, until you’ve stepped out of the box. Paul talks (wisely, I think) about a “life of the flesh” versus a “life of the spirit,” for instance. But you simply can’t have a full dialogue of this sort — or any full conversation about the nature of ourselves, especially the egoic “false self” — without an understanding of this underlying nature of the self as pure awareness.

Key texts: The Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, A. M. Almaas’ The Point of Existence, etc.

Key practices: Vipassana (self-observing meditation), deep circling and other depth-oriented relational practice, etc.

2. Reality itself is awake and relating to us (or, the Kingdom of Heaven has a sovereign)

For some people, this is comfortably described as a personal, relational God. And if you believe in God, there’s a basic intuition here — that reality itself is awake, and tuned into us, and you can interact with It.

But like the premise of self-realization, I think the full implications of this basic awareness is rarely deeply thought through — and it can be helpful to free it from conventional terminology like “God”:

• This awake reality is that in Whom we live, move, and have our being.

• This awake reality is the totality in which we are always cradled.

• It is with this awake reality that we have our most fundamental, most intimate relationship.

There are many, many implications and I feel like talking about them would just gum up sublime things in language.

Just think about it. Reality itself is awake, and relating to you.

Advantages: All sorts of existential alienation is much more healthily resolved if we are communing with a loving, conscious source. Without it, false forms of alienation remain, and we reify them in ourselves, and amongst one another. Even in spiritual groups, this can lead to a lot of unnecessary bullshit.

Meanwhile, this conscious ground of reality is the true signal. And tuning to it is the most effective calibration. Opening to this divine calibration is one of the most gentle but sure routes of personal development.

Key texts: Genesis, Psalms, the Bhagavad-Gita, David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God, etc.

Key practices: Prayer, contemplation; sitting “wholly given up,” making every act an offering to God; corporate worship; etc.

3. The Gospel (or, the Kingdom of Heaven is among you)

The four canonical gospels (and apocryphal gospels) relate the archetypal intersection of a high expression of divinity with the raw messiness of humanity — as actual (pseudo-)historical events. Whether you are Christian or not, this easily makes them some of the most singular, profound texts ever written.

In these stories, this embodied, divine contact touches macro-scale sociopolitical structures and day-to-day communities. It touches all social strata, from the ultra-wealthy to the completely marginalized. It touches interpersonal social and family relationships. It speaks to the interior of people. It seems clear to me that there is still, to date, no more significant description of this fundamental intersection between divinity and humanity in the entire canon of world literature.

To be clear, when I say the Gospel, I don’t mean a one-line message or a few talking points. I mean a large, irreducible gestalt, including, but not at all limited to:

• Fishermen dropping their nets and following Jesus, the “anointed” one.

• The Judaism that Jesus says he was there to fulfill, and its deep history, including:

  • A society trying to live as a “nation of priests.”

  • The tradition of prophetic witness — criticizing and energizing.

  • An emphasis on justice and care for the marginalized.

• The Sermon on the Mount

• “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.”

• Forgiveness, mercy.

• Washing feet.

• All that walking around, teaching and healing. Eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. Attending a wedding feast. Wandering off and sitting by oneself on a mountain.

• The scrapping with the establishment — the Pharisees, the Temple authority, the eventual machine-like intervention of Rome (which, prior, Jesus largely ignores).

• The journey to Jerusalem. Jesus’ confrontation at the temple — the “den of robbers.”

• The “last supper;” the betrayal; the moment at Gethsemane.

• With curiosity: the miracles, the transfiguration.

• The crucifixion and the resurrection.

• The interpretations and reflections, starting with Apostolic letters and early commentaries. The mystics.

• Repentance, salvation, relationship with the “living Christ.”

• Etc., etc . . .

I mean, a profound, hard-to-grok hyper-object, which ought to be turned over and over and over. Regularly. Daily. And in communal practice. You don’t have to be a church historian. But a deepening familiarity with this hyper-object.

There might be other archetypes, besides the Jesus story, that fit the bill just as well.

But I don’t know what they are.

(And I’ve done a nonzero amount of looking.)

Advantages: The advantages are hard to summarize, but maybe they are already evident. There are volumes to learn about spiritual work put into practice in the day-to-day world here — personally, interpersonally, systemically, cosmically. (These insights are greatly enriched when the other four “levers” are being used at the same time.)

Key texts: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; the Gospel of Thomas — and any preferred “riff” on these: the apostles’ New Testament letters, the “Revelation;” Clement, Origen, other mystics, etc. The Hebrew bible, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other prophets. Reza Aslan’s Zealot, Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Wisdom Jesus, Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew, etc.

Key practices: Church participation: worship service, service in a church community; small group participation; individual reading and study, collective reading and study; contemplation; etc.

4. The near-death literature (or, the Kingdom of Heaven is above you)

This might seem like one of the oddly specific things to add to the list of the above, because I think some people associate the near-death literature with a sort of airport-paperback sensationalism. But I am very clear that, like the Gospel, near-death literature is some of the most profound revelatory writing there is — and most of it is highly contemporary.

Think about it. People die and go to a life beyond, and then they come back and tell us what they saw. What could possibly be more profound than that? Often they say very similar things. I’m not saying this is a field with the precision of science, but a certain increasingly specific theology is emerging from near-death reports, including:

• From the perspective of the “other side,” a human life is considered a privileged, but very temporary learning experience.

• Each of our human lives has a purpose and a blueprint, including foreordained events and relationships.

• (There is some continuity in relationship between this side and the other, but sometimes the relationship there is different from the relationship here.)

• At the end of a life, we review our experience, and we have an opportunity to feel what others felt in various scenarios we attended.

• Many constraints of human experience do not exist on the “other side:”

  • There is a sense of unity with all beings as emanations of an infinitely glorious and tender source.

  • Sensory perceptions are greatly expanded; interpersonal communication and knowing are immediate things.

  • Time does not exist — at least, not as it does here.

• Thought creates. (Here, slowly. There, much more quickly.)

• We are not permanently attached to our mistakes, but mistakes are ways for us to grow and learn (c.f. “The Gospel,” above)

• The main purpose of life is to learn to love.

Advantages: I think this canon clearly sheds incredibly valuable light on all other spiritual revelation we’ve collected in this world. To me, the advantage is obvious: How could it not be beneficial to learn from people who have stepped outside of human life and returned?

Key texts: Embraced by the Light, by Betty Jean Eadie; Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander; My Descent into Death, by Howard Storm; The Applications of Impossible Things, by Natalie Sudman; The Nosso Lar series, by Chico Xavier; Emmanuel Swedenborg. Etc.

Key practices: reading the NDE literature; contemplation of divine realms and NDE descriptions of divine personages, world of love, etc.; life review “simulation” in daily life experience; contemplation of the temporary nature of life; seeing behind the ostensible surface of everyday appearances to possible spiritual depths.

5. The physical cosmos and human embodiment are valid, significant, and beautiful — and we can work toward a more beautiful world (or, the Kingdom of Heaven is around you)

At least three of the preceding premises somewhat pointedly direct attention away from incarnate experience (excepting “The Gospel”). But it feels worth giving what’s implicit in the Gospel a little more direct attention.

Let’s assume we’re not here to simply escape from some dreary, Gnostic prison. Physical reality has its own validity and beauty — and we can work to clean up how we live and work here.

Sometimes I’m reminded (and I’ve written before) that aromatic spices are mainly the efforts of plants to ward off insects. Plants arm for war, and we get cinnamon, cardamom, chipotle, sage. It says something about the inherently aesthetic nature of this physical realm. It’s as though you dredge a stick through the riverbed, and beauty wafts up.

The universe is wild, aesthetic, exquisitely fine-tuned and, ultimately, good and love-built. Being in a body is a gift. This experience is to be transcended, in some ways, perhaps. But none of it is merely to be escaped.

Key texts: This is the domain where my reading is most limited. So I’d be open to suggestions. But off the top of my head: The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, by Charles Eisenstein; An Altar in the World, by Barbara Brown Taylor; Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Etc.

Key practices: A range of somatic awareness and meditation practices; authentic relational practice that is somatic-based; exercise, yoga, massage; all forms of physical intimacy. Biophilic communion of all sorts — hikes, “forest bathing,” lying out under the stars, etc. Aesthetic celebration and craft — art, dance, preparing food. Ecology of care — making concrete efforts to care for local ecosystems and the physical needs of others.

Form without faking

To me, spiritual practice is largely an effort of pulling a signal from the noise. There are subtle, but solid phenomena to be discerned. There is such a thing as toward and away, upward and downward, even good and evil. There are worn paths, and frontiers.

The clearest perception of all of these requires deep inquiry. The goal here is to structure the inquiry while minimizing the artifice. So you stay on the road, but you get to be yourself while you do.

I think these levers promote truly meaningful, relevant practice that leads organically, meaningfully, toward fuller life in that “more beautiful world.”

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
The Kingdom of Heaven has a sovereign.
The Kingdom of Heaven is among you.
The Kingdom of Heaven is above you.
The Kingdom of Heaven is around you.

In my experience, these are the important things that go variously unsaid, and I deeply, achingly long for the place where they’re all said at once.

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Since the release of Dan Farah’s Age of Disclosure documentary earlier this year, the recent releases of UAP videos and related documents from the US government, and, especially, since the release of Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, I’ve been doing an increasingly deep dive into the UAP phenomenon.

Last week, a friend of mine who’s pretty deep in the disclosure effort recommended a couple of documentaries by James Fox: The Phenomenon and Moment of Contact, which are both free on YouTube (here and here, respectively). I watched them both. The Phenomenon is a great overview of some of the most compelling UAP events since World War II, and I highly recommend it. But I found Moment of Contact much, much more affecting.

This film is about an incident that occurred in Varginha, Brazil, in 1996. In late January of that year, a local couple living on a farm outside of town say they watched a school bus-sized craft cross the sky, descending and appearing to sputter white smoke. A few days later, another eyewitness says he saw a craft of similar description crash in a field. He rushed to the crash site, only to be chased away by Brazilian military personnel, who arrived within minutes.

Soon after, the military descended on Varginha, blocking access to a few blocks in town. Three girls walking through the blocked-off neighborhood said they saw a non-human being crouched against a wall, no more than eight or so feet away from them — a being three or four feet tall, with bright red eyes, dark brown skin that appeared slick and oily, and three horn-like ridges on its head. Reportedly, two military police officers later apprehended a being of the same description about a block away from where the girls had been. Earlier in the day, it was reported that a second being had been caught by firefighters in the nearby woods. Witnesses said this being cried out like a child as it was being taken.

One of the military police officers reportedly handled one of the creatures with his bare hands. He contracted a mysterious infection the same day, and he died a few weeks later.

Numerous medical staff report the Brazilian military descending on a local hospital. A neurosurgeon says that he was summoned to the hospital under guard and asked to perform an emergency procedure on a strange, non-human being. Military personnel say that a body was moved to a local base, where it was retrieved by personnel from the United States government.

One peripheral, but remarkable detail that ties all of these incidents together is the testimony of a strong sulfur-like, ammonia-like smell, which lingered in the nostrils days or weeks after the incident. The eyewitness at the crash site reported this smell; so did the three girls who witnessed the being in the neighborhood lot, and also their parents who followed the girls back to the lot after the being was gone. Reportedly, the smell was so strong in the hospital that the wing that had been commandeered could no longer be used for a period of time.

The sheer volume of testimony in this case, and the consistency of the testimony, is striking. The three girls were featured prominently on the news around the time of the incident, and they have made themselves available to the media since. Several other eyewitnesses continue to speak to investigators — on the condition of anonymity, because they say they were threatened with severe consequences by the Brazilian military if they ever spoke out — but they still speak.

Many of these eyewitnesses testify in James Fox’s documentary. Carlos de Souza, the man who says he saw the Varginha craft crash, led Fox and a camera crew back to the site of the crash — the first time he had returned since the incident. When they finally find the site, he keeps repeating, “Aqui! Aqui! Aqui!” and patting the air with his hands. Then he starts to weep.

I dunno. I was left with the strong impression that these people witnessed what they said they witnessed. And that what they witnessed was an extraterrestrial vehicle crashing on some farmland, several of its occupants getting captured by the Brazilian military, and perhaps one of them dying in custody — perhaps from injuries sustained during the crash.

I’d definitely invite you to watch the documentary. I’d invite you to watch a lot of this stuff. The number of eyewitness UAP and ET testimonies that have accumulated over the decades is now vast. Recent disclosures add resolution to an already sizable canon of data that extends back almost eighty years. There are now something like tens of thousands of eyewitnesses on record, including thousands of trained observers staking their reputations on what they’ve seen. In some cases, like Varginha, there are scores, even hundreds of eyewitnesses to a single event. (While in a case like the “Phoenix lights,” there are as many as thousands or tens of thousands of witnesses.) There’s video, photos, and rumors of even more conclusive video and photos.

In Dan Farah’s Age of Disclosure, dozens of supervisory-level officials are on record now, saying that there is a hidden program in the US government, co-umbrellaed by three different agencies and private sector entities, but apparently working with slippery autonomy and secrecy between all of these. This program allegedly has deep, extensive, and still mostly undisclosed knowledge about the UAP phenomenon and the non-human beings involved. Sitting and former officials claim that what’s been released by the US government is still just the tip of the iceberg of what’s known — and documented — in the US alone.

Meanwhile, in many of the cases currently in view it’s hard to see how the eyewitnesses could have mistaken what they had seen, or what the motivation could have been to lie. Why would Air Force pilots lie about what they’d seen? And given their claims and the video evidence, how could they have been mistaken? How could astronauts have been mistaken about the unusual nature of what they’d seen?

In some cases, it’s not clear how a lie could even have originated. At a private elementary school in Zimbabwe in 1994, numerous children said they saw a craft land in a nearby field, and that they experienced a telepathic transmission from beings that emerged from it. Their testimony, both from soon after the event and from years later, is featured toward the end of Fox’s first documentary, The Phenomenon.

It’s worth watching that testimony. Seeing these witnesses speak, as children and later as adults, I found it hard to imagine how elementary-aged children could have developed such an elaborate story, of such detail and consistency, and related it with such emotional commitment, sincerity, and intensity, and remained so committed to the story so completely for so long — if it weren’t true.

Even with all of this, though, I still find it hard to process the UAP/ET phenomenon. Even as the evidence accumulates, the implications are still a little hard to digest, aren’t they?

I think they’re hard to digest largely because of what I’ve come to think of as the tension between the Kraken and the squid — that is, the tension that we perceive to exist between mythical lore and the observable, naturalistic phenomena that we expect the lore to turn out to be.

We’re pretty sure there have never been giant monsters in the sea creating whirlpool vortices that suck ships down into the deep. Crater Lake in Oregon was likely created by a volcanic explosion, not by a mortal battle between Llao and Skell, the respective underworld and sky gods of Klamath Indian mythology. The myth of Fimbulwinter, the years-long twilit cold supposed to precede the Norse apocalypse, Ragnarok, could have arisen from dusky, wintry conditions created by massive volcanic eruptions in the 6th century, occurring as far away as Central America. Vampire lore may originate from a very real blood condition medically named “porphyria.” Et cetera.

The federally commissioned Project Blue Book was famous for making these kinds of Kraken-to-squid reductions out of UAP reports. From 1952 to 1969, Blue Book functioned like a sort of federal Scooby-Doo gang, poring over a growing trove of claims, looking behind the spooky curtain, and often finding plausible explanations.

This is what we’d expect reasonable authorities to do. But even at the time, it was argued that Blue Book was actually explicitly tasked with downplaying the UAP phenomenon, essentially acting as a public disinformation campaign. One of its lead investigators, J. Allen Hynek, who was initially a skeptic of the UAP phenomenon, eventually defected and criticized Blue Book for actively suppressing evidence and steering the narrative toward banal causes.

It isn’t surprising, as Project Blue Book explanations — which attributed sophisticated sightings to things like the planet Venus or, most famously, “swamp gas” — frequently triggered public outcry even when they came out. And in the decades since Blue Book, it’s become increasingly well-documented that, behind the scenes many authorities, including people in the aforementioned secretive program, were always taking the phenomenon much, much more seriously.

The extraordinary thing about the UAP phenomenon is that, when you try to see the real “squid” behind the “Kraken” reports, often the most compelling “squid” explanation remains that the reported Kraken are just . . . real.

This is an especially hard thing for industrialized humanity to grasp, I think, when we’ve spent so long talking ourselves not only out of the idea of so-called supernatural phenomena, but much more specifically out of the idea of transcendent, non-human intelligence. (Or ultra-human intelligence.) The urge to debunk the ET phenomenon falls right in line with claims that Jesus was just a wise dude. That angels were figurative. Or that the ground of reality can’t possibly be conscious, itself.

But really, I think it’s worth considering how fishy this entire habit of dismissal really is. The first big mistake, it seems to me, is supposing that it’s any less mythical to say that transcendent beings don’t exist than it is to say that they do. The truth is that neither of these stories is strictly empirical. They’re both outside the purview of empiricism — they’re both stories. The main difference is that one story is more disenchanted than the other. And, increasingly, one tracks less well with the facts.

It’s not unreasonable to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but the second big mistake, it seems to me, is to prefer the story that we never encounter transcendent, personal, embodied intelligences. Because in the end, it seems clear that this is not only an exceedingly dry way to live, but it’s also an unrealistic way to live.

It’s not less realistic than blunted approaches to the idea of transcendent intelligence, like a reflexive, poorly interrogated belief in ETs, or fundamentalist religion. But it is definitely less realistic than nuanced, thoughtful approaches to these.

Christianity is one of the most notable of these pursuits of extraordinary embodied intelligence. It’s the supposition that a perfected consciousness exists in the form of Christ, and that we can deepen our understanding of this perfected being through contemplation and group practice. If you are sufficiently loose about the historical claims, it seems clear to me that this is an entirely plausible supposition. And, if you’re sufficiently loose about the historical claims, it’s also an entirely reasonable way to pursue a compelling mystery.

The UAP phenomenon is similar. It’s the supposition that transcendent embodied intelligence has arisen on other worlds, and that some of those folks have developed the ability to come here. I wouldn’t recommend building a religion around it. But at this point, it really seems much more plausible that this is occurring than that it isn’t.

Both of these are adjacent to all sorts of claims that receive less attention. Visions of the Virgin Mary. Testimonies about ascended masters — including, for instance, not only the testimony of all those Theosophists from the 19th into the first half of the 20th century, but the adamant testimony of Wayne Peterson, for instance, a 13-year career diplomat who later directed the Fulbright Scholarship Program from 1980 to 1997.

All of this, of course, is in the ballpark of one central thesis that I’ve been pursuing for a long time now — perhaps perseveratively at this point. When people talk about the disenchantment of the industrialized world, as they increasingly do, it seems to me that this may well be the heart of the disenchantment:

The heart of the disenchantment is the story that transcendent intelligence doesn’t already exist and that it isn’t accessible now. And the re-enchanting story is that transcendent intelligence does exist, and that it is accessible. Right now. With that contact perhaps occurring in more than one way, and with more than one form of transcendent intelligence.

Abraham’s encounter with three beings in the cool of the day resonates anew. Lot’s cataclysmic encounter in Sodom. Ezekiel’s strange encounter with the seraphic creatures appearing in “wheels within wheels” and bestowing on him a prophetic mission. The symbol-laden “revelation” of John. Arjuna’s conversation with Krishna. And, if you will, that sky-battle described elsewhere in the Mahabharata.

Let’s not say all of these ancient stories were actually ET encounters. I think they probably weren’t. But there is at least the suggestion that mythic scope isn’t as figurative as we think.

That’s not to backtrack into superstition; it’s just the invitation to live, again, in a world with no lid on it.

. . . With the footnote that, increasingly, this lid-less picture of the world also tracks much, much better with the available evidence.

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In a 1965 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans said that religion was “very important” to their lives; it’s fewer than 50 percent today.

In 1945, as much as 78 percent of Americans attended church; it’s 45 percent today.

The number of people with no spiritual affiliation at all has also climbed sharply. As recently as 2007, Pew Research estimated the “nones” comprised seven percent of the population. Since the pandemic, it’s grown to 28 percent.

I doubt these numbers would surprise anyone. Most people I know do not participate in any religious service, and even the most spiritual people I know are rarely engaged in a spiritual system with a particular mythical framework.

And I think it’s pretty easy to guess why people have left religion. I would guess it’s mostly because religious messages felt less and less relevant to people’s daily lives. The conversation in church felt less and less connected to daily experience. It felt like it was solving fewer problems, because it failed to even address the problems.

What’s interesting to me about this, though, is that there’s no reason to believe that the Gospel story has lost relevance.

• The question of how God and humanity intersect has not lost its relevance.

• The need for individual cleansing, renewal, and guidance as we navigate the distractions and the turbulence of the world has not lost its relevance.

• The warning against worldly empire has not lost its relevance, nor have the suggestions for how to navigate in safe, healthy ways in a world so committed to empire.

• The “flipped script” kingdom, in which the greatest are willing to be the least, abandoning thoughts of themselves to involve themselves in the needs of others, has definitely not lost its relevance.

The sermons at the church I’ve been attending recently all have a few things in common: they’re attached to scripture, they’re relevant to the process of human development, and they talk about the subject of the week in a thoughtful, lived-in way. Last week, the sermon was about shame, and the pastor quoted the gospels and Brené Brown. This week, the sermon was about decentering from oneself, and the pastor both quoted the gospels and cited psychological research about the effect of awe.

A combination of frameworks, ancient and contemporary, makes the message lively.

I think there’s just no doubt that the West has made a huge mistake in stepping away from its traditional mythical architecture. The Gospels are actually an incredibly complete archetype. The basic model is a solid foundation for inquiry at the four essential levels:

1. intrapersonal

2. interpersonal

3. systemic

4. cosmic

But if it’s treated like it’s airtight, I think problems arise. I’m not sure I understand fully the nature of the problems. But it can be hard to live fully in too airtight of a scripturally-based system. And when it becomes hard to live in it, and parts of the organic lives of the participants starts to be left out, and so the life of the practice starts to fade. In my experience, relying on scripture alone starts to feel, sometimes, like you’re trying to write an encyclopedia, and all you’re allowed to use is the words and phrases from a TIME magazine from 1986.

You can even start to get the impression that there’s no frontier. But if you go to a religious or spiritual institution, and there’s no sense of being at the frontier, what is the point of being there at all?

Also, though, in my experience, if you step entirely away from deep, ancient wisdom, like the Gospel story, or like the Upanishads, or the Bhagavad-Gita, you also start to drift. Psychotherapy is leading people to some amount of grace, no doubt, and maybe it can change the world. But Christianity did change the world. Out of its complete archetype.

It is utterly bizarre that we make so little use of collective spaces for pursuing meaning. In retrospect, I think this will turn out to be one of the strangest aspects of our era.

What is the point of life, if you’re not gathering with others to meaningfully inquire, in an all-hands-on-deck-way, what the point of life is?

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Last Sunday, I attended a lively worship service at this church I’ve been exploring, and then in the evening I attended a meditation and talk at a Buddhist sangha.

I have deep respect for Buddhism, particularly its teachings about the mind, and attachment, and illusion. I think there are ideas in Buddhism that Christianity should revive and reincorporate into itself.

I have, perhaps, an even deeper respect for Vedanta from which Buddhism emerged, and I’m becoming increasingly interested in the precept that “Atman is Brahman” — i.e., that the individual soul is ultimately identified as the expression of the Absolute. I’ve been reading The Point of Existence, by A. H. Almaas, which is basically commentary on this idea filtered through the lens of Western depth psychology — and I’m sure I’m going to have more to say about it.

Also, at this sangha I was reminded that mindfulness, as an end in itself, ultimately ends up being a little aimless. Because mindfulness isn’t an end in itself. Relationship is. Mindfulness can greatly enhance your relationships, but if you treat it like a goal, I think it can quickly start to become a waste of time.

There are Buddhists who understand this. On Sunday at the sangha, somebody quoted the Dalai Lama: “Do not try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.” I think this makes total sense. And Western Buddhists like Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, and Almaas, of course — whom I’m getting to know.

But the bigger question is who, or what, we are in relationship with?

The fundamental truth I think — which mindfulness alone can completely overlook — is that relationality is ultimately what shapes our character. Relationality with one another, obviously. And with ourselves. And with aggregates like circles, institutions, communities, and systems. And, as I’ve been making the hard argument, relationship with God.

And it only takes a little bit of contemplation, in quiet, away from the world to see that relationship with God is the essential calibration.

Without a personal behavior of the Absolute, it seems to me that the de-centering of mindfulness practice actually turns into a kind of collapse. The validity of isolated consciousness in the body disappears, and it becomes difficult to make the distinction between the ego and the “true self” — or any sort of truly cosmic “yes” and “no.”

You see this arise again and again when Westerners have questions about Eastern notions of enlightenment. What is an enlightened person like, if there is supposed to be no self? Usually, in my experience, the answers are evasive. And if so, it’s easy to understand clear why. It’s because the ontological foundation of the entire endeavor is often ambiguous.

Without a the spiritual north star of a personal Absolute in the spiritual discipline, the pursuit of character formation becomes tacit.

We can calibrate to our social groups, but by definition, any social aggregate perceives, discerns, loves, and acts imperfectly. So if we just seek belonging with one another, or mere status, we are seeking alignment in a hall mirrors. Belonging, alone, is no real sign of being on course, because every group is at least a little off course.

On the other hand, if we’re wholly loyal to ourselves, then we are discipled to an imperfect guide, also.

We can be loyal to ideals, but we imperfect-but-dynamic selves are trying to have an encounter with abstractions: The ideals may be noble, but they’re not alive. They’re mindless. They can’t actively save us.

And as Martin Luther ultimately concluded, we probably can’t save ourselves from ourselves by ourselves, altogether.

But if God is there, all of our pursuit is happening within the auspice of a perfect consciousness. Which we can seek out. And encounter. When we de-center from our personal identification with ourselves, through mindfulness, we don’t have to dissipate into nothingness. We open to the contours, the structure of this divine Personality.

I love the Psalmist on this. If you want to cultivate relationality with the Absolute, read the Psalms, I’d say. Human life is full of trials, but the Psalmist brings it all, faithfully to God — affirming that God has a character of generosity and justness, striving to be in alignment with this nature, imploring God for help. This basic model from a three-thousand-year-old theology is still highly useful today.

You can triangulate the relationship by connecting with other people who are working on themselves, and life, and their relationship with God. This can actually be really great, actually. More than great. Necessary. The most effective way to pull the Absolute signal from the noise is to see it reflected in others. In others’ deliberate pursuit. In scripture.

But ultimately, your relationship with God is personal, and deeply intimate. We approach the Absolute as its children. It’s not a relationship with an abstraction, or an administrator. As Jesus said, we are addressing our Father (or Mother) in heaven.

The relationship leads to deeper and deeper fathoms of sincerity and surrender, and it reveals the clearest calls to action.

All concepts are a commentary on the original fact of God.

And harmony emerges, and underlies all the strain, out of the most important question that could exist:

Are you right with God?

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Then Peter spoke up, “We have left everything to follow you!”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.

Mark 10:29-30

*

If God exists, if the essence of reality is a being-consciousness-bliss that interacts with all manifestation in a personal way, accompanying us and attending to us as an ultra-mother, ultra-father, ultra-companion, ultra-sovereign, ultra-guide; and if God transcends space and time — or physical spacetime, as we are beginning to understand it — obviously and necessarily transcends these, I mean — then there is the possibility that individual consciousness surpasses space and time, too, in some way.

This is something that people talk about in the near-death literature all the time: Individuals aren’t just eternal through time; they are eternal because they exist outside of time altogether. NDE-ers often talk about how, from a higher perspective, immediately accessible after death, a human life is incredibly brief. Just a flicker. And yet all of the experiences in life are incredibly important.

It’s profoundly liberating to explore this sense of eternity — and in some ways, probably necessary. If we live, essentially, in a pocket of dialed-down God that is completely surrounded by, and actually still inevitably saturated with God (just God willfully being not-recognizably-God), and if our temporal existence is just a subset of our life with God, designed to teach us and develop our relationship with all things — including with God — then this enables a freedom of movement, and a depth of experience that changes the stakes of life altogether.

In some ways, all the events in our lifetime are like passing weather, seasons occurring across the essential sunlight of our relationship with other eternal beings and with God. I mean, interactive weather. It’s more complicated. But extremely temporary compared to the deeper aspects of being.

Care is required at all levels — for our relationships (including with God), for our souls’ well-being, for the material, social, and societal matters that need care. But certain kinds of fear can start to evaporate with the realization that our activity occurs in a birthright of eternity.

I’m reminded of Steve Jobs’ quote from the 2005 commencement speech at Stanford:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Jobs was pretty agnostic about the afterlife through his lifetime, but I’d pair his philosophy with his last words (according to his sister), as he looked over the shoulders of family members:

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

I wonder whether our day-to-day anxieties don’t reduce to two main fears: the fear of falling and the fear of death. The fear of falling is the fear of being ejected from the experience of safety, belonging, guidance, uplift by which we seek wholeness. And the fear of death is obvious — it’s the fear of ceasing, or losing capacity in some permanent irretrievable way.

But in a universe emerging from God, intoning the possibility of our own immortality, neither of these fears are what they appear to be. The fear of falling is the fear of being abandoned by a perfect parent and guide who loves us ceaselessly. Does this ever happen? And death is not to be feared, either, because death simply doesn’t happen.

I think the greater fear is a different kind of falling and a different kind of death.

The fear of falling becomes the fear of moving out of relationship with the relational Absolute. I’m reminded again of C. S. Lewis’ quote about Aslan, the leonine God/Christ king in the Narnia books: “He’s not tame, but he’s good!” In relationship with God, the fear of falling becomes a fear of rupture in this relationship — or the fear of the initiations that God has in store for us.

And the fear of death becomes the fear of another kind of death — the fear of that which starts to alter the fabric of the soul in ways that become increasingly hard to undo. Evagrius enumerated eight main risks: gluttony, lust, greed, dejection, anger, ennui (“acedia’“), vainglory, and pride — and after him, these eventually evolved into the seven “deadly” sins: gluttony, lust, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.

These sins aren’t “deadly” because you’re sentenced to hell for doing them; they’re deadly because they constrict the soul’s ability with the richest parts of transcendent experience. There’s an impetus to be careful about what wears grooves in us.

Also, though, there is life to be lived increasingly free from fear. A bolder, more faithful walk. Living care-full-y, but immortally.

There’s a clear invitation. To live like an immortal who is here to do soul work. To step into the embodied fullness of this reality. To be the holy fool and the sage; the child and the priest; to assert and surrender both with a deepening perception of this legacy into eternity. To live with complete opening, complete surrender. Awakening to our true context.

Because if the universe is a manifestation of a good Mother, good Father, good Teacher, we can open here, into the fullest extension of our truest work.

Is there a reason not to?

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1

The National Cathedral is among other things a tunnel traveling back two thousand years. It points to an itinerant preacher wandering around in Palestine, teaching and healing. His most devoted followers called him the Anointed, the Son of God.

Also, the National Cathedral is almost entirely unlike an itinerant preacher wandering around first-century Palestine in pretty much every conceivable way. It’s a towering structure of ornate white stone, gothic arches, with decades of history and centuries of ancestry. It’s so large that it’s almost physically loud.

The National Cathedral is unlike Jesus. But it is perhaps not totally unlike heaven. It’s maybe as though hyper-dimensional heaven tried to press itself into our reality. It didn’t quite break through, but it made a little bulging thumbprint in spacetime. Heaven pressed there, and workers scurried like ants to sculpt an impression on our side of things.

The first stone was laid in 1907, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, and the final finial was placed in 1990, when George H. W. Bush was in office. It took 83 years for that thumbprint to reach its final form — which, in terms of eternity, is no time at all.

I live about a mile from the National Cathedral. The past few weeks, I’ve started to get the impulse to walk there after dinner.

So after dinner on Memorial Day, I do.

2

Much later in the week, some of the faculty take the seniors to an athletic center in Fairfax County for their “senior trip.” I expect the place to be big; I don’t expect it to be what it is: sprawling and airport-like. Several regulation-sized astroturf soccer fields. Glistening hardwood basketball and pickleball courts. An Olympic swimming pool. A climbing wall. Two NHL-sized hockey rinks. Spas. A cafe. All in an indoor, rain-proof complex. We let the students free to migrate from area to area, which they do in groups. They mostly stay off their phones.

The sports complex was created by the brother of one of our faculty members. He owns it. The first proposal for the sports complex was submitted to Fairfax County in 2013, and it opened its doors in 2018. Four-hundred and fifty thousand square feet; proposal to opening, five years.

I point out to a couple of students that this sort of thing can originate from something as simple as some conversations. I tell a story about how my father was part of a group that discovered a semi-permanent homeless community living in the median between I-95 and Route 175 in Howard County. They went and talked to these people, and asked them what they’d want in a day center. Eventually, they built a brand new day center. It looks like a community college inside. Not unlike this sports complex.

3

It’s been raining on the evening that I walk to the Cathedral, so I expect I will sit somewhere wet, and I expect I will walk home with a wet spot on my behind. Because I will have gone to the Cathedral, I also expect I won’t mind. I will have turned my mind to spiritual things, and I will be unconcerned about how my behind looks or feels. When I get to the grounds in front of the Cathedral, I notice a singular dry spot on one of the wooden benches, so I sit there.

It’s damp and warm, and hospitable the way evenings are. Long days of rain have created a foggy haze, but the big clouds have started to break up, and off in the distance between big, dark shelves the sky glows a pure yellow-white. This evening spectacle is both far away and massively relevant.

Also, there are lots of gnats. People are waving their hands in front of their faces. I am waving my hand in front of my face. I start pinching some of the little bastards out of the air. “All creatures great and small” starts running faintly through my head.

4

On the school trip, there is a lot of time for the adults to chat. I talk with one of my colleagues about getting older. He tells me about Andy Richter performing on Dancing With the Stars. Apparently, Andy Richter was utterly transformed. “He said that his instructor just knew how to re-connect all the broken connections in him,” my colleague says. “He could feel all these rusty, corroded wires getting reconnected.”

One of our students flops, loose-limbed, from ten feet up a climbing wall, onto a thick mat. “How do we lose all of those connections?” my colleague asks.

“Can I let my freak flag fly a little?” I say. “I think we come from light and love, and the world is entropic. It has a sludgy, slowing-down quality. And we’re here to learn to work with it. Sometimes, you see something attractive, off in the sludginess, and you go trudging off toward it. And by the time you get there, you’ve been changed by the entropy.”

“Yeah, yeah,” my colleague says, charitably, but without much heart. I don’t feel he’s really with me on this.

I don’t feel like he should be. I have tried to build a cathedral with my words, but what I built is bad.

5

The day before my walk to the cathedral — so, last Sunday — I tried out another church that I’ve been visiting recently. I felt the Spirit powerfully there. The music was very deliberately building a field. The message was simple: Seek out — don’t invoke, seek out — the Holy Spirit. Wait on the Holy Spirit, so that it can make you more like Jesus.

Later in the day, there was another worship service about connecting with the Holy Spirit. The pastor said, “This is not a usual service. If you want to move around, do. In fact, I hope you don’t spend the whole time in the same seat.” People who wanted extra prayer were prayed over by a volunteer team. We broke up into groups and talked about our purposes, our goals — how the Holy Spirit is trying to work in our lives.

Start to finish, I am not sure how many years for that one.

6

When I am out in DC, I often get the impression that everybody in the gospel is on the street. The poor in spirit are there. The centurions are there. The Sanhedrin are there. Herod and Herodias are there. So on Memorial Day, when I go on a walk to the Cathedral, everybody in the gospel is there.

At the Cathedral, people dribble past with various ideas apparently driving their minds. Tourists proud to be here, with each other, in their family. A priest who appears to be confidently busy with the dullest of logistics.

When you associate this giant structure, and all its associated action, with the itinerant preacher in first century Palestine — seeing it all as a valid, but only fractional expression of his legacy — you do get a very concrete sense of how great that itinerant preacher was. Called the Anointed. Called the Son of God.

The Cathedral is architecturally precise, and inside and out its exaltation reaches toward God. God can arrive in there, I imagine. And God also shows up in gnats. Right? The Cathedral is not diminished by the gnats, but out here the gnats are definitely not eclipsed by the Cathedral.

I am left with the impression that inside the Cathedral, one may not hear an adequate sermon about gnats.

A woman in her twenties walks out of the church in a white robe with a green clergy vest, and she looks off, in a diagonal direction, toward Wisconsin Ave. She has long blonde hair and good posture, and she is beautiful. Much of the good seems to converge in her. She does not seem transcendent, but in a quiet, chaste way, she makes something transcendent seem close.

7

There are no gnats in the sports complex. Not a single one.

Actually, I’ll bet there are gnats. And ants. Roaches. And so on. But you’ll never see them or think about them.

At the sports complex, “All creatures great and small” does not run through your head quite so easily.

8

The other church that I attended started out in the rented rooms of somebody else’s building. Then it grew and they bought a gothic stone church on 16th street. Vaulted and repainted on the inside. Not half as big as the cathedral.

They project the lyrics to the songs on a large linen screen strung between two stone columns at the front. Through the linen you can see the light of a long, large stained glass windows.

Inside this space, it feels alive. People are really doing the work.

I want to go to this church more often, and I am hesitant. I haven’t been disappointed yet, and I expect to be.

Christianity, in its available forms, is enticing and imperfect. It’s hard.

9

I’ve started reading Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation this week — tentatively, at first, because I wonder whether he’s going to be talking and talking about things that one ought to just be living, instead. But so far he appears to be thinking broadly and deeply, and I’m compelled. One thing that’s stuck with me is this simple idea, peripheral to his most significant points, but resonant: Sin is “a breach of friendship with God.”

Friendship with God.

And not being in friendship with God, it occurs to me — but being within friendship with God.

10

I’m hoping that my walk to the Cathedral will help me re-establish some mystical consistency in my life. (Also, confessionally, I am starting to write this piece in my head when I’m there.)

But the mystical breakthrough does not occur. Instead, I leave my dry spot on the bench having received a simple mantra:

“Not my will, but Thy will be done.”

It may sound like cheap gravitas, here at the end of this piece. But it’s honestly what I got, and it’s not cheap.

Out of care for our friendship with God, we can seek the Holy Spirit, to be more like Jesus. Reconnecting the corroded wires, like Andy Richter, to participate in the renewal of all things.

Seeking purpose, having goals. Building. Minding all creatures great and small, as we wade through entropy:

Not my will, but Thine be done.

Not my will, but Thine be done.

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This week I started listening to the audiobook After by Dr. Bruce Greyson, about NDEs. Greyson is an esteemed psychiatrist who’s held numerous august positions in various institutions, and he’s particularly notable for being one of the four co-founders of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), which is the leading hub for near-death phenomena in the world.

I could barely get through the first chapter of the book, though. This may be a reflection of where I am right now, more than anything, but here’s why: Even as one of the co-founders of IANDS, Dr. Greyson remains (uprightly) agnostic about the near-death phenomenon. He sees a plausible explanation in the idea that consciousness precedes bodily life and continues after bodily life, and he also sees a plausible explanation in the idea that the phenomenon might be brain-based.

This is an entirely scientifically defensible point of view, and many people would argue it’s the point of view with the highest intellectual integrity. And, at the moment, I don’t care that it’s defensible. I don’t want to hear it.

There are now many thousands of documented accounts of NDEs, many of them described as utterly convincing, hyper-real experiences, and many of them revealing uncanny, verifiable perceptions of reality. A woman born blind seeing for the first time during her NDE. A young child meeting her would-be sister who, unbeknownst to her, had died before she was born. Dr. Greyson himself was introduced to the phenomenon years before IANDS, as an intern, when a woman emerged from a coma and told him she’d seen him talk to her friend — a conversation in another room that she simply could not have perceived with her bodily senses, while in a coma. He was wearing a tie, she said, with a tomato-sauce stain on it — which he’d hidden from view behind his lab coat.

It may not be epistemically wrong to say that there could be multiple ways to explain phenomena like these. But right now, listening to Dr. Greyson gives me a feeling that verges on disgust. Greyson is so loyal to science that he’s using it to overwrite what people are saying they’ve seen with their own eyes. That’s not intellectual humility; it’s the opposite. It’s culturally normalized gaslighting.

And it starts with a very good thing. We’re fallible, and we know it. It’s solipsistic to suppose that reality is what it first appears to us to be, so we try to transcend our limited view. We hypothesize, we test, we measure, we discuss. And we do transcend our limited view this way. We become more aperspectival because of it.

But also, ultimately, scientism and the brain-based consciousness hypothesis it favors are claustrophobic. They imprison us within these fleshy brains, looking at numerical readouts to determine reality — then taking antidepressants, boosting those brains when they start to sag, and wondering why we feel so bad in the first place. It’s becoming clearer all the time: scientism, left unchecked, has strangled the world.

While I was listening, grumpily, to Dr. Greyson, I was reminded of another method that people have used to overcome their fallibility — a much more ancient one — the reliance on the authority of scripture. My Church history professor at Wesley Theological Seminary was a particularly strong proponent of this. If scripture is God-breathed, then we can use its authority to see beyond our fallible (I think he used the term “fallen”) selves. In fact, we must. Because our own windows are too dirty to steer by.

Again, I think he’s not wrong. Our perspectives are clouded by the imperfections of our current state. There is something of sin in this. And it’s useful to try to find something to leverage ourselves out of it. And scripture can be used this way. But also, there’s something missing if you leave it at that.

In both of these cases, science and scripture, there is the admission of our fallibility, and there is the desire to transcend. And in both of these cases, the method used can indeed leverage us into greater clarity, but it also narrowly defines the window of apprehension.

Science alone is, remarkably, not very good at ontology — but we can forget. Scripture alone is, remarkably, not very good at progressive humanistic social theory — but we can forget. It’s partly because we get locked into one or two methods of overcoming our fallibility that we get lost. And it’s partly because we underestimate how important the work is at all.

I’m reminded that both of these methods, science and scripture, are nested in the ancient disciplines of yoga. For thousands of years, yogins have explored much more exhaustive ways of cleansing our vision. Jnana yoga refines the intellect through reason and study. Bhakti yoga purifies us of our self-centeredness through devotion and worship. Karma yoga does the same — through service, and through the encounter with the dynamic divine in action. Raja yoga, the yoga of will, empowers us to push out of the chrysalis through our own effort. These disciplines are deepened through specific practices — like meditation; like vipassana, the exalted practice of self-observation.

Without a deep, multifaceted understanding of self-transcendence, we are likely to go in circles. There’s no such thing as ortho-doxy (right belief) or ortho-praxy (right action) before there is ortho-antilipsis (right seeing). And you can approach right-seeing best by working at it from many directions: sharpening the reason, studying God-breathed text, bowing to the divine, subordinating the self to the other, exerting the will. A multidisciplinary approach suited to a multifaceted goal.

In this broader, more holistic sense of ourselves and the ways we see reality, I find much more room to breathe. Science and scripture are narrow compared to the broad epistemic maps of yoga. With both science and scripture our organic, living attention can be subordinated to something more algorithmic and fixed. The scientific method isn’t alive; it’s algorithmic. Scripture isn’t necessarily alive, either, insofar as the ancient words do not change.

But widening the frame, there’s still the risk of subordination to fixed, non-living process, even in yogic practice. I’m very suspicious of subordinating something consciously dynamic, like us, to anything less-than-consciously dynamic, like any mere text, or practice, or rule set. An inert law. The rote, empty worship of deities. Perfunctory service. Self-transcendence when we’re overcoming just for the sake of it — without a clear idea of what we are overcoming toward.

The subordination to structure alone, to algorithms, is a form of self-erasure. And we can see the result. The uninhabitable parts of our lives and our cultures are in no small part the result of unhealthy types of self-denial. The subordination of the self to a machine. This comes most obviously from subordinating ourselves to science, but I suspect that part of the reason science seemed so alive in the first place was because of the ways that people were numbed by subordinating themselves to an algorithm of scripture over centuries. Or an algorithm of systemic belief.

For years, I struggled in models, too — superstitiously — even when I turned to the broader explorations of yoga. Groping around in practices, I was hoping for something supernatural to occur. I imagined all sorts of things, as a veneer over reality, not realizing that reality itself is both hard and miraculous. You just have to get to it.

This is what After reminds me of — those veneers; those sterile, perfunctory boxes. Greyson’s agnosticism stands in the doorway of the miraculous — a transcendent, but also imminent, day-to-day miraculous — but then it strands you there, in the doorway. Because . . . maybe none of it’s real, except in the brain? The reason he’s stranded is his method — his unmistakable, but qualified integrity — the misapplication of essentially dead efforts toward transcendence.

What is missing, in all of these empty cases, is relationship. I-Thou. We are not just transcending out of ourselves; we’re transcending into the embrace of an ultimate Presence. In a universe emerging from a conscious Ground, we don’t have to subordinate ourselves to inert algorithms. We don’t have to be agnostic; we can be embryonic. Embedded in a field — and in a Being — that is omnipotent, omniscient, and off the scale with light and love. We can try to tune into that Being which is ceaselessly attuned toward us — transcendently — to stumble, to reach, and to grow, all under a perfect, active, interactive attention.

In this case, our fallibility, for whatever reason, is designed. We take a multi-pronged approach to purify our vision, but we seek a distinct experience — abba, Father; immah, Mother. In a universe growing out of a living source of Being, there can be no higher priority than to pray without ceasing:

Practice science — but pray without ceasing.

Study scripture — faithfully, historical-critically, and source-critically — but pray without ceasing.

Contemplate right relations at the systemic level, and the healthy kenosis it requires — but pray without ceasing.

Contemplate right relations at the personal level, and the healthy surrender it requires — but pray without ceasing.

Look within, read the text of the self — but pray without ceasing.

We can commune with the foundation of the universe itself, which is the most intelligent, the most sensate, the most virtuous, and the most dynamically alive thing there is, or could possibly be:

A totality alive, aware, and intimate: the I AM.

A totality transcending space, time, and any frame we could ever have or use. Giving us being as a pure gift — and personal in our direction, tending, lovingly, over us.

This is where the ortho-antilipsis aims. This is the ultimate secret, I believe:

Life aligns when its every aspect is a commentary on the original fact of God.

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This post is kind of a break from recent threads. It’s about something that comes up in my world from time to time:

When I talk to people outside of Christianity about Christianity, often they’ll say that they’re interested more in gnostic Christianity than in mainline Christianity. Generally, I’ve come to understand that what they mean is that they resonate with a Christianity that is mystical and grounded in experience rather than in doctrine or dogma.

In that sense, I totally get where these folks are coming from, and I agree. Gnosticism comes from the root gnosis, which means “knowledge,” and as Karl Rahner famously said, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a 'mystic' — one who has 'experienced something' — or will cease to be anything at all.” I think this is true, and in my opinion this is one of the essential ciphers to the future of Christianity. I’m not sure I would be interested in Christianity if it weren’t.

But also, after studying the history to some degree, I’ve started to chafe at the idea that the actual gnostics had a more fully realized spirituality than their Christian contemporaries did — because if you look closely at what we know, I’m not at all sure the gnostics had the better vision than their more orthodox Christian contemporaries.

In the second and third century, Christianity was much more speculative and fluid than it was later. To me, it’s one of the most interesting periods of the faith, by far. There was a mainline of spiritual leaders who paid assiduous mind to lines of apostolic succession — who was taught by whom, and which of those “whoms” had been taught by which apostle — with the idea that the closer and more demonstrable the apostolic lineage, the more likely the teaching was true to Jesus’ actual message. But as the message and the practices fanned out, various leaders held various views on the Hebrew Bible, the Gospel story, and the cosmology in which these elements were situated. They had different teachings, different messages, and even different sets of scripture1.

In this archipelago of views, some ideas were more convergent, and some were more frictional with one another. When viewpoints created friction, the opposing leaders would sometimes denounce one another as heretics. Along the way, a throughline of mainline thinking began to distinguish itself from the heretical. In retrospect, this looks to some people like a Romanizing Christianity becoming increasingly dogmatic and imperial, while to others it looks like an emerging church casting off the chaff of fringe opinions — either because they didn’t accord with apostolic teaching or because they didn’t make theological sense for other reasons.

In my opinion, if you look over the first five centuries of Christianity or so, you see some of the latter and some of the former. But when you look at the folks who were denounced as heretics in the second and third century, it’s often not hard to see why. Marcion, for example, was famously denounced because he taught that the God of the Hebrew Bible was capricious and vengeful and that this was a metaphysically different deity than the God of the New Testament who sent Jesus to earth. And docetism — the belief that Jesus was a wholly divine avatar who, depending on the sect, could be said to have neither sweated, nor bled, nor left footprints when he walked — was denounced because it bypassed the complex idea of the wholly divine and the wholly human combined in Jesus — as was essential to the more orthodox Christ story.

It’s hard to know for sure who exactly the “gnostics” were in all of this, because we only have a very limited record of them. Before the Nag Hammadi library was discovered in 1945, in fact, we only knew about gnostic beliefs from the Christian apologists who were denouncing them as heretics. And while the Nag Hammadi texts greatly expanded our understanding of the gnostics — including the gnostic Christians — it’s clear to me that there’s a tendency for people to project their own ideas into who the gnostics were, and this ends up distorting both what people think about gnostics and what people think about early Christians.

Here, for example, is the basic story (in paraphrase) of the Apocryphon of John, one of the gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi. See if you feel this is a better way to look at things than the Genesis story and the gospels:

The Monad, the supreme principle of the universe, begets a series of divine beings, the Aeons, who fill the divine realm. Against the will of the Monad, the Aeon Sophia (Wisdom) attempts to beget a being of her own. This goes awry, and she creates a monster, Yaldabaoth.

Ashamed of Yaldabaoth, Sophia hides him away, and in his isolation, Yaldabaoth begins to believe that he is the only god. So he creates the material world, and a cohort of Archons, to serve him.

Yaldabaoth and the Archons attempt to create a man, Adam, but Adam turns out to be bright and superior to them. So they imprison Adam in the material realm, in Eden.

The task of Adam and his descendents becomes to liberate themselves from the material realm through gnosis, in order to escape the prison created by the monstrous Yaldabaoth, the forbidden ill-begotten offspring of Sophia.

This is Christ’s move in gnostic Christianity then: to liberate people from the essentially evil prison of materiality. You get a hint of this, for instance, in Verse 56 from the Gospel of Thomas, (which is essentially repeated in verse 80):

Jesus said: He who has known the world has found a corpse; and he who has found a corpse, the world is not worthy of him.

What do you think? Better than Genesis and the canonical gospels?

I’m not suggesting that you only have a choice between one or the other. But second-century Christians like Irenaeus and Tertullian didn’t have a hard time choosing. They rejected gnosticism on the basis of the idea that anything in the universe could have been created by anyone but God, and also on the basis of the idea that the world itself was a corruption, and they preferred the Judeo-Christian narrative as they understood it. God was good and God’s creations were good, these early Christians said2. Humans were alienated in God’s creation because of their own sin, not because they were trapped in a prison. God’s plan was to restore humans to right relations with the rest of good Creation.

Meanwhile, though some Christians in that era may have downplayed the idea of gnosis or a true God-realization a bit, many didn’t. Clement of Alexandria in the second century and his intellectual successor Origen in the third, for example, had a sense that perfected human experience entailed some kind of union with God. So did the desert mothers and fathers of the 4th century. So did, for instance, Bernard of Clairvaux in the 11th century. Eckhart. Ruysbroek, etc., etc.

To be clear: the early Christians didn’t reject gnosticism because it was mystical; they rejected it because it delegated the creative power of God, and because it had such a dark view of the material world.

This isn’t to say that orthodox Christianity was always on target. Origen was essentially excommunicated (anathematized) in 553 CE, for instance, partly because he believed that souls pre-exist — which I actually think is right — and partly because he believed in what’s called apokatastasis — or the idea that all created beings, including Satan, will eventually be reconciled with God — which I also think is probably way closer to the truth than most ideas of eternal damnation.

But in that early, fluid, more speculative phase of the Christian second and third century, Origen and Clement were pillars of the Church — espousing their views on direct communion with God — while other pillars of the Church, Irenaeus and Tertullian, were taking a stance against the idea that the world was some kind of grotesquerie created by a demiurge. In the Christian view, the world wasn’t a prison created in a sort of giant, freak cosmic accident; it was a good, even paradisiacal place that needed to be restored through the redemption of human sin — and from which a deep communion with God was possible.

I think this misunderstanding of the tension between the gnostics and the early Christians is unfortunate for two reasons: On the one hand, the early Christians don’t get credit for their ability to see a holy life in a good material world. And on the other hand, when later iterations of Christianity tended toward that darker, world-denying spirit that was actually more characteristic of the gnostics, that grimness gets taken as the essential spirit of Christianity — when, in the early centuries, it was actually something that Christian thinkers actively fought against.

It can be fairly debated, today, whether all versions of Christianity tend to favor a vibrant, life-affirming relationship with incarnate life. But I definitely think healthy Christianity can favor this — and that much of it does. It certainly seems clear to me that this is the best way to read the gospel story3.

The early Christians were getting a lot more right than some people think they were. And the gnostics weren’t necessarily cheated out of their deserved win in the early marketplace of ideas, despite how they’ve been romanticized in the past few decades.

If you want to go back to something vivid and “gnostical,” it’s this fluid, philosophical, mystical, Platonic-permeable Christianity that you actually want — or would be better off — to revive. Not the so-called “gnostics,” themselves.

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I’ve spent the past seven years or so doing a deep dive into Christianity, and treating Christian community as more or less my primary community for spiritual work. Recently, I’ve been feeling some tension in that container, and though I don’t think that’s changed my relationship to Christ or my commitment to being a follower of Jesus, it has made me feel a little restless.

On the one hand there’s a resonant, anchoring narrative for me in the Gospel, and in the Psalms, and in Genesis. Here are some of the deepest places that I turn in my spiritual life, the things that I trust the most deeply: a home, a place to seek the safety of total surrender. And on the other hand, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, overwhelmingly, many of the people I know who are at once the most ethical, the most clear-seeing, the most fully alive, and the most truly wise are in a more spiritually liminal world; that this is the frontier where I believe much of the most transformative work is being done, where the “house churches” for the next dispensation are being established, and where I can do much of the best of my own transformative work.

I entered my deep dive into Christianity with this tension, and I feel a clear need to re-excavate this tension in my life, and also a need to re-excavate this tension in the writing here — this place where I’m basically thinking aloud.

One of the ways the tension showed up for me this week was in the interplay between a key idea I started the week with and a key idea I ended the week with.

The first idea is the idea that the gospel story can be read as a nearly desperate attempt for Absolute goodness and light to bridge any gap of alienation between us and It (or Her, or Him). Earlier in the week, I started writing a post about this — the premise, the story, that God sends His [sic.] only son to be crucified for the sake of repairing any breach between God and humans, and how completely demonstrative of God’s love that is. If you feel alienated or separated from goodness in any way, there’s something incredibly powerful in contemplating the symbol of Jesus on the cross, as a sign of how desperate God is to be connected with you, and how completely God will never give up.

As I continued writing, the post began to go sideways and to orbit Paul’s idea of being the “new creation” — which feels worth talking about, but at another time.

Meanwhile — and to me, as a clear precipitate of the “dreamtime” that I’ve recently been in — a friend has started sending me texts out of the blue with wisdom that he has been receiving. He’s writing a sort of sutra every day, or as they come, and he’s been passing them along.

This was Friday’s:

A butterfly helped out of its chrysalis too early cannot fly.

The struggle is not the obstacle to flight. It is what makes flight possible.

It came with this commentary:

I love this when I read about the resistance of pushing through the shell is what forces fluid into the wings.

Yup.

Interestingly, in the research for this post I discovered, for the first time, that the science indicates that butterflies have an internal pumping mechanism that sends fluid to the wings, and this mechanism operates independently of the effort to emerge from the chrysalis. Helping the butterfly out of the chrysalis can do damage to the birthing process, but it’s more likely because it damages the butterfly’s legs and/or prevents it from finding a suitable place of attachment on a branch from where to operate this process of pumping into the wings.

That’s the science, but I don’t think this makes my friend’s sutra either less true, or less beautiful. It doesn’t have to map onto the science; it maps onto something deeper. In this way, actually, the story of the cross and the story of the chrysalis are very similar. Their association with tangible facts in the temporal world is up for discussion. But the tangible facts of the temporal world harken to a fuller, more transcendent truth.

The cross is a two thousand year old metaphysical observation, attached to historical events, which has lost none of its luster in the two thousand years since those events occurred. The chrysalis is a recent metaphysical observation, based in science from the 1600s, and burnished into a new story about growth in the late 20th century.

The tension I am experiencing between Christianity and the liminal is in some ways neatly summed up with the cross and the chrysalis. With the cross you have a God that is completely in control, that always has us. You have the pain of sacrifice and rebirth, but it is a pain of relinquishment and surrender. It is the sign of what God does for us and in us, through an active, perpetual grace and love.

The chrysalis story, on the other hand, is about how our tender new, perfecting will forces the fluid into our own wings, making us more of who we are meant to become. The will comes from the divine seed within, pushing up through us. It is a gift, like the entirety of our being is a gift. But once gifted, it is ours. It is our will. It is our stretching into what we are meant to become.

In its original form, the story of the cross lacks the story of the chrysalis. And without it, the pupa waits. Peaceful. But pupal.

In its original form, the story of the chrysalis lacks the story of the cross. Without it, the will turns into a despot against God. Empire arises inside the self.

Put together, I follow God into the liminal, and the liminal into God.

I hope to meet you there.

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As I’ve been continuing to do weekend intensives of spiritual and relational practice the past few weekends, I have entered something that I’ve come to call “the dreamtime.” I’ve been here before. It’s a period of intense love, possibility, revelation, magic, and synchronicities. I am doing process work when I am awake and when I am asleep, and sometimes I’ll recall part of a conversation, and I can’t remember whether it happened when I was dreaming or when I was awake.

As just one example of what this mode is like: This year I have returned to Quaker education, where I first began teaching more than twenty years ago, and I’m teaching at the first Quaker school where I ever worked. (Twenty-some years ago, I worked here as a camp counselor.) This has already been a significant closing of a loop for me. But then in past few weeks, in the “dreamtime,” I’ve learned that one of my first students has been living in the apartment next to mine for a year and a half. We hear each other’s activity through the walls all the time.

One of the defining features of the "dreamtime” for me is the open-hearted and dogged pursuit of truth at all levels. The kind of truth that sets you free. The kind of truth that can be painful, but which, if it doesn’t set you free, isn’t the truth. The kind of truth that tears open the richness of myth right in the middle of our so-called ordinary lives. The kind of truth that can only be experienced through the entrance into love. Saturating love that surrounds and pierces any apparent aridity or coldness — and which is perennially available, across our trials, if we endure, and if we leap.

It’s available because it is the inevitable destination.

This pursuit of truth can be said to occur in four interpenetrating aspects:

• Personal: We go within.

• Interpersonal: We experience between.

• Systemic: We aggregate into culture, which departs from individual control.

• Cosmic: We live within an absolute, as its children, at the threshold of what we can know about It, or Him, or Her.

Each of the four aspects is essential. Progress in any of the four aspects is mediated by progress in the others. Self must see system; system must serve selves. Etc. All occurs within a cosmic mind-eye, and heart, and will.

And one of the essential parts is the ability to read the text of one’s personal self.

The interior of any person is a divine region, with both sublime and profaned textures, working its way to apotheosis. No matter how dry, or malformed, or cheapened the surfaces appear to be — either appear to us when we regard ourselves, or appear to us when we regard another — the inner seed is always holy. And so, entirely, is the process by which the seed unfolds. At least, I believe it is.

There is multidirectionality — toward, away; up, down; sacred, profane — along multiple vectors and curves. The nuances get very subtle and exquisite. But the whole process here on earth is holy. We are in the process of seeing that.

There is something incredibly powerful about getting people together to talk about the texture of their experience for long periods of time in a structured, intentional “container.” Particularly when this is combined with interludes of breathwork, movement, chanting, and/or meditation. In a good sacred circle, you can read the inner texture of yourself, in the presence of good listening. You can bring that raw truth into an interplay with other raw truth. The result is electric, and accelerating. What emerges is a field in which that truth becomes much more lucid.

When someone says “truth,” the postmodernist in any of us might say, reflexively, “Well, what do you mean by truth?” In these sacred circles seeking truth, there’s less reason to ask. Truth is what is emergent in the space, experienced uniquely by everyone in it, with collective aspect as well.

You sometimes hear conservative evangelical Christians talking derisively about the idea of “my truth.” And I think there’s a point to be made here. The past six months or so of writing have been devoted to establishing that ultimate reality is conscious, and willful, and relating to its creations in a personal way. And if so, then the obvious implication is an ultimate convergence of viewpoints. Not only is there an “aperspectival” view of reality, but we can suppose that this view is always being held by the conscious ground of everything. If so, that’s worth keeping in mind. “My truth” is always subordinate to the absolute — and along the way it’s must always be in dialogue with other more local “truths.” So there are versions of the idea of “my truth” that are not mature, for sure.

But also, it’s clear to me that it is absolutely essential to read the full text of oneself. Partly because, whatever we have made of it, this entire text is God-given. It is not to condone hedonism, and it’s not to speak against self control. But if we pick and choose too much in ourselves, there’s a way that we are playing God in ourselves. The much, much better thing is to bring all of it — all of it — to actual God. And by “God,” I mean the God that is in everything.

In Genesis, Jacob wrestles all night with a divine being beside the Jabbok river — perhaps an actual avatar of God — and afterward the divine being gives him the name “Israel,” the one who wrestles with God. This then becomes the name of God’s chosen people. Moses wrestles with God. Jonah wrestles with God. Before all of them, Hagar, outcast handmaid of Sarah, wrestled with God, in her way. In his way, Jesus wrestles with God at Gethsemane. And on the cross.

It’s best to bring it all to God. And in order to bring it all, you have to see and inhabit it all. And seeing and inhabiting in sacred circle is incredibly powerful work. That’s the point here.

Authentic relational practice also begins to protect us from what otherwise is a basic, violent tendency of community. Cultures, of any size, establish norms. This can be the culture of a small group of people, a church or sangha, a nation, or, increasingly, even a global popular culture. Of necessity, these norms tend to be majority norms, and they will tend to be frictional for people who don’t fit the majority well — including people on the fringes who are inherently deeply goodwilling.

The more a spiritual community is sufficiently savvy about the logos of self, the more flexible and nuanced it is able to be, and the less unnecessarily rough it may be to the selves that compose it — whether they are outliers or not. The group becomes both gentler toward the nuances of individual experience, and more firm in its “tough love” toward the rough edges of people, which might otherwise get glossed with an essentially repressive politeness. Tuning into the logos of self, the group has the ability to see much, much more clearly where the real yoga for each individual lies. The real spiritual work. And there is real love, and real catharsis at the same time.

This is made visible and rich simply through skillful authenticity. The authenticity creates clarity. And the clarity creates a field.

Authentic relating reveals a basic truth, which is that all is yoga — all the time. Everything is leveraging our sanctification, our apotheosis, our birth into real love. Every next moment is in fact the next perfect movement of life for us. Moment, by moment, by moment.

Authenticity — shared, brave, dogged authenticity — unlocks it all.

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In Genesis Chapter 12, Abraham builds an altar to God for the first time. Picture a small, rustic affair — a structure of unhewn stone1 probably not much bigger than the size required to sacrifice an animal. He builds several other altars as he goes, returning to some of them later in the story.

In the book of Exodus, set centuries later, Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into the wilderness. He meets God on Mount Sinai, and God gives him instructions for how to build the Tabernacle. This is an ornate, movable tent, consisting of an outer fence made of posts and fabric, a modest inner pavillion, and a “Holy of Holies” within the larger tent.

In the wilderness, the Israelites use the Tabernacle for worship. According to the story, after forty years they settle in the Promised Land2, there to be ruled by God’s Law, which is mediated by judges. When this system starts to deteriorate, they fantasize about having a king. Through the priest Samuel, God says kings are not a good idea. “A king is going to tax you in all kinds of ways,” God basically says. The Israelites decide they want a king anyway.

They get Saul, who’s okay. Then they get David, who’s a big deal — until he falls from grace. He’s succeeded by his son, Solomon. Solomon builds the first temple, next to the palace — according to 1 Kings, with the conscripted labor of tens of thousands of slaves.

The temple becomes the center of Israelite life for centuries. When the kingdom of Israel fractures, and its two successive kingdoms fall to the occupation of neighboring empires, the temple is destroyed. Later, when the Israelites are allowed to return to the land of Canaan, one of the signals of a return to normalcy is the rebuilding of the temple. But the new temple is not nearly as good as the old. In fact, some people who remember the old temple reportedly start to cry when they see the new one.

But eventually the new temple becomes a centerpiece of Jewish life again. It’s partly around the politics of this temple that the Maccabees stage their rebellion against the Seleucids, in the 160s BCE. Politics surrounding the temple spark uprisings afterward, against the Romans. Eventually, in the midst of one final revolt, the Second Temple is destroyed in 70 CE, when the diaspora begins.

Before the temple is destroyed, though, it’s the centerpiece of at least one other remarkable story. Jesus visits the Second Temple shortly before his crucifixion,3 around 33 CE, arriving in Jerusalem on a donkey and, according to the gospels, heralded by the cheers of the people. At this point, the temple has become a commercial spectacle, with wealthy people purchasing animals for sacrifice at the temple for the falsely theatrical cleansing of their sins.

Jesus erupts with indignation at this sacrilege. According to the gospels, he overturns tables and drives the money changers out. He says, “You have made my father’s house a den of robbers!”

Altar. Tent. Temple. Den of robbers. The cycle begins again with the church. The early Christians form house churches, endure distrust, marginalization, and occasional convulsions of persecution. Then, in the 4th century, first protected status by the Roman state and, later, the status of being the official religion of Rome. At this point, lavish cathedrals are being built, like Hagia Sophia. And the message shifts. No longer is the “kingdom” a vision of social justice sweeping through the terrestrial world. The kingdom is a joy outside this world, while here, wealth and power consolidate with the clergy.

Not long after, Anthony overhears the gospel in a local church and, as it gestates in him, he leaves everything to wander out into the desert. Thousands follow . . .

The cycle iterates throughout Christian history. A few monks form a monastery, which produces simple goods and receives tithes. Generations later, abbots have concubines. And handfuls of simpler monks secede. The church re-imperializes in waves. People show up to listen to the story while, in the process, making the exact same movements. In response, it sprouts prophets. Benedict. Francis. Luther. Teresa. Lawrence. George Fox. Jeanne de Guyon. John Wesley.

Altar. Tent. Temple. Den of robbers. In some ways, it’s the cycle of anything we build. It’s the cycle of hippie farmers eventually becoming Whole Foods, which eventually becomes a subsidiary of Amazon. It can be the cycle of a nation. It can be the cycle of personal achievement, like careers.

It’s clearly a mistake to assume that Bible authors were progressively developing exactly this point, which they expected to culminate in Jesus, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that they were variously in the process of excavating something real that was perhaps most keenly articulated in the gospels — seeing it in reflections and intonations along the way, passing on the clues.

The patriarchs of Genesis, for instance, were shepherds who could stand with kings. Abraham meets as an equal with priest-king Melchizedek and the King of “Salem” in a fabled valley. Joseph, his great-grandson, becomes the vizier, and effective ruler of Egypt — not a king, but a king in stature. The greatest spiritual richness lies with the spiritually exalted, but also with the comparatively materially low and temporary.

Jesus doesn’t build anything, except a movement. Some of my favorite beats of the gospels are the moments when Jesus walks out of a house and sits on a hill, and a crowd just forms around him. The structure is formed not by bricks or stones, but by the energetic lines emanating from the Son of God.

Clearly, there is ordering in the universe. There is structure. There is hierarchy, too — not hierarchy of obedience, necessarily — and not necessarily hierarchy as we think it exists — but some ways are more refined than others, and some attainments are more extensive than others. There are lines and boundaries and alignments. Natural order is a matter of solidity. But it’s also a matter of flow.

There are deep questions about what should be solid and permanent, and what should be fluid. What should order the structure of a church, for instance, or an esoteric order.

The past few weeks, I’ve been fortunate to be doing a series of workshop intensives involving practices that are being developed in the more spiritual parts of the “liminal web,” and it’s reminded me how my main interest is bridging the liminal world with the luminous core of Christianity. I’ve been thinking about esoteric orders in particular as I finish a workshop about Gurdjieff, led by a wonderful man. I’ve been thinking about the Theosophists, for instance, and their specific catalogues of attainment — five discrete initiations dividing people into definite categories.

Where do these well-hewn, human-articulated categories of attainment fall in the progression we’re talking about? Are esoteric hierarchies an altar of an idea, more clusters of affiliation than anything else, handling the principle of human development in an organic, mutable way? Are they a tent of an idea? Firming the walls a little bit? Are they temples, fortified institutions with august entrances and thick walls — perhaps starting to clearly stratify socially and allocate each one firmly to their place? Is it a den of robbers, a stronghold for a wealthy, self-justifying so-called elite, a tool of outright racists, and so on?

I’ve been thinking about the stage theories of Integral theory. The one stage theory missing from Integral theory is a stage theory for how people handle stage theories. Some people are very mythic-literal about stage theories. Others are aperspectival.

I should be clear: I think we need temples; I think temples are good. Ideally, you can walk in through the doorway of a temple, and through its activities gradually rise right on up into heaven. An edifice like this on the earth is a material expression of the deepest fact, that God is always with us. As a solid, tangible statement of this principle, a good temple is a truly beautiful thing.

But each stage in the cycle is also prone to its dangers. At the level of the altar and the tent, we are at the mercy of raw wills — not only God’s but any will stronger than our own. So we seek fortification for the sake of security, but the thing which brings us security is dangerously likely to be the focal point for idolatry. When we become attached to the idols, it starts to corrupt us.

Then the servants, who are supposed to be washing feet, make temples out of their own egos. The leadership taxes, like Samuel’s kings, turning God’s house into theirs.

Meanwhile, the Jesus of the gospels has a pretty simple stage theory. “The last shall be first, and many of those who are first will be last.”

If you want to sit in the highest seat, you have to drink from the most bitter cup — of crucifixion.

In the gospel, the order is just more or less what forms around Jesus sitting on the hillside. That, apparently, was Jesus’ idea. And, despite the rumblings throughout history, both the apostles and their successors, for several generations, were adamant: there was no additional, hidden teaching.

The fluid, white-hot magma of revelation has to solidify and cool as it extends into this entropic plane, and it will result in increasingly rigid forms. This is probably inevitable, and much of it good.

But there’s also a distinction, as has been noted before, between the “church visible” and the “church invisible.”

The firmest walls are God’s, uttered in the still small voice, after the whirlwind, fashioned in the material of light and love.

In some ways, the most authoritative structure is movement itself.

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(This essay continues a series that begins here.)

I confess that I know Martin Buber’s I and Thou only in bits and paraphrase, but I think it’s not that hard to pull into view a living difference between I-Thou and I-It relationships.

Which is to say, I’m going to have a different attitude toward a fork that I take out of the drawer than I’ll have with a student that I’m tutoring in math. Because it’s very evident that the student is a “thou” and the fork is more of an “it.”

With the fork, the “thou-ness” that takes center stage is mine alone. When I eat, I’m thinking about my experience of the food, and I’m hardly thinking about the fork at all. When I wash the fork, it’s mainly going to be for my sake and the sake of other “thous” in the household.

With the student, there’s obviously more care and concern. But here, there’s friction in half-measures. Like, when we say, “Oh, of course I know this person isn’t an it,” and then assume that our perception of “thou-ness” is sufficient.

The truth is that our perception of “thou-ness” is always insufficient. At the very best of our effort, we are only asymptotically approaching an understanding of the interiority of another person — and often we’re attempting far less. I think maybe the best way to characterize it is to say that, at best, our perceptions of thou-ness are forgivable and insufficient. And they descend from there.

It seems to me we treat people as instruments far more often that we realize. We don’t think of them as “its,” I don’t think, as often as we think of them as “flat characters” — a living witness reduced to a set of predictable responses. A source of stuff rather than a being having an experience, just like us.

About eight years ago, at the same time that I started my deep-dive with Christian practice, I also started working with students one-on-one as a full time job. Throughout my life at that time, I was thinking a great deal about my roughness, repentance, and need for purification. At work, I spent a lot of time thinking about the passage in Matthew when Jesus says that whatever we do unto the least among us, we do unto him. With each student, as an exercise, I used to imagine that the student was Christ playing the role of the student in front of me.

This turned out to be a profound experience. Sometimes I would have the sense that Christ had been completely brainwashed by the role of being the student. Christ as a true, aware “pilot” of the life1 was not particularly visible. But much, much more often I saw evidence Christ laboring as Christ does: humbly, carefully, wisely.

I also saw the dare that Christ was making, through the student: Here I am. I’ve made myself vulnerable, as I do. Will you be fooled by the exterior, or will you see the complete sacredness in the depths?

I realized that if I do not look very carefully, I am one of the ones who’s jeering while he — or she — carries the cross.

Buber might say that the purest experience of the “thou-ness” of the other involves throwing out models altogether, and just sinking into presence. In this respect my exercise fell short. Seeing another person as Jesus, or the Christ, actually still flattens them a little — it’s another overwriting with my own thesis.

But I think Christ-in-disguise is a good primer, at least. A strong thesis about God in others can break up our conditioned frames — as long as it doesn’t become a new conditioned viewpoint.

My quiet little office, on the quiet second floor of a five-story office building in Dupont, was a great laboratory for this meditation on the divine in others. It became a basis for my one-on-one teaching practice, and then it started to undergird my relationship with other people in general — submission, even a bit of worship, of the divine within the other. It’s harder to do in more bustling environments, and now that I have a new job, I’ve lost the practice a little bit.

But it’s clear to me that right relations with another involves a cultivated awareness at this level — of the Christ-like sacredness of the other — and poor relations lacks it.2 When we interact, we are witnessing one another, changed by the witness, and changed by our effort to be a witness.

And the most absolute basis possible for this kind of relationality, of course, is a theistic personalism. In this case, there is personal interplay with the nature of reality itself. God validates our personhoods, inviting us to see that validation in one another. And God also offers the ultimate relationship.

I don’t think we can suppose that the essential nature of God changes through our interactions with God — for reasons that have been laboriously explored. But I think we can suppose that God’s orientation toward us may change. I’m reminded of Moses negotiating with God about his mission, and God suggesting that Aaron go with him. (And then Aaron becomes the priest.) I think this is something worth contemplating deeply when we think about our mutuality with the divine. (While discarding, in my opinion, the idea that God fundamentally evolves.)

If the cosmos is not personal, then our capacity for I-Thou is reduced to a flex. In this model, we are the icing on the cake of originally impersonal forces. We flicker in and out of the universe’s highest achievements. If we’re not careful, it’s all to our glory — perhaps even subconsciously. And, ultimately, mutuality is optional.

But if the cosmos is personal3 then our capacity for I-Thou is the deepest ontological and spiritual necessity there is, or that possibly could be. We are always growing toward the reality that is relational — heirs to a way, which is the way of the All, trying our best to earn our heritage and, ultimately, only being truly fulfilled through the All’s grace.

With scientism, the personalist tendency was enclosed as “anthropomorphism,” a childish, egocentric habit supposedly widened by a more mature, clinical view. And see what was lost: The habit of personalism is actually a humble courtesy. And meanwhile, nowadays, for instance, we revise our estimate of the intelligence of living beings steeply upward — all the time. And we wander alone in a universe in which it is actually metaphysically impossible to be alone — except in perception.

Reality itself is unlocked through personalism. We are coaxed to I-Thou because in the end the All is a Thou. And this constrains the way that anything is an it.

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(This essay continues a series that begins here.)

It’s not easy to verify what God is like here on earth. If there’s a divine source, its nature is obfuscated in incarnate life, which is why this whole thread about God has been occurring in the first place.

If we’re not careful, our understanding of God can be influenced by our understanding of human power and, perhaps especially, I think, by our understanding of our parents. When we come into this world, and our consciousness has been largely wiped of our experience of any other world, that’s our very first proxy for all-encompassing personal, relational power.

In some ways, parents are like God. I think it’s clear that we all have a kernel of divine consciousness in us, for instance. And parents are often inspired, at the very least, to love their children the way God loves us. I’m not a parent, but I’m aware of this desire to love perfectly from working with children my whole adult life — and I’m also aware of how imperfectly we all love, too.

And obviously, parents are totally unlike God in many ways. They have (or had) their own messy growth edge — which, depending on their generation and background, they may have felt obliged to hide. They have (or had) things at stake like any human, and they are (were) learning how to steer like anybody else.

So it’s a good idea to dig deeply into the version of God that’s has been shaped by our parents. Because if God is personal, it’s easy to see that God’s personality is really different from humans’ in important ways. One can suppose God doesn’t have anything at stake — except for our sake. That God is the fullness of being, and is self-causing. That God’s goodness is without limit.

Especially, if ground of being is conscious, volitional and, therefore, personal, there is the possibility that reality itself — the very fabric of it — is deeply kind.

Or, maybe not kind. I resonate with C. S. Lewis’ quote about Aslan, the lion king of Narnia who stands in for God/Christ: “He’s [sic] not tame, but he’s good!” This seems like a great way to put it.

As I’ve said before, one of my favorite beats in the Bible is a moment after the Fall, when God is sorting out what’s going to happen. As God is talks about the consequences of the Fall, I think it’s possible to see shades of real spiritual consequence intermixed with a conflated God/parent — which is a complicated can of worms that maybe we should just skirt past for now.

But the part I’m thinking of is right after God is sorting out these consequences — when he makes the man and the woman clothes.

To wit:

Here’s Earth, sun, stars, life, animals, and a garden. All of it’s good. Don’t eat from the tree.

“We ate from the tree. Now we feel naked.”

Okay. Here are clothes.

To me, this moment in the story is more significant than the fall, itself.

When children make mistakes, they can create difficulty for parents. Parents can be impatient. Parents can be afraid. Parents can get stressed out. But God? What’s God got to be impatient about? What does God have to be afraid of? What stresses God out? Again, except for our sake?

I think it’s easy to suppose that God experiences stress for our sake. That God suffers as we suffer, as theologians throughout the millennia have supposed. But past that, what’s at stake for God?

This is why it’s so important to think through the implications of God. Inherent to the very idea of God, for instance, is the idea that existence is a willful gift. If God is giving you existence itself in every moment, then what else is God giving you?

The idea that the ground is sat-chit-ananda, being-consciousness-bliss, is inherently the idea that grace is everywhere. A healing, warming, reviving vector toward life and wholeness. Which never lets go. Never gives up. And never ends. On some level, every moment is a perfection. Every moment is salvation, whether we are aware of it or not.

It’s probably worth making a distinction between what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” For Bonhoeffer, cheap grace is an intellectual understanding of spiritual assurances that insulates us from a sincere experience of our circumstances. Meanwhile, costly grace involves feeling all the texture of life. Our effort, and carelessness; our raw, ragged, here-and-there-calloused souls; the great interplay of all forms of being. And then, also, in the fast-moving mix, to feel an underlying assurance that everything is observed, known, and related to by the living, conscious ground. That everything operates under God’s grace.

This is grace “on a cross,” so to speak. Grace congruent with reality as we experience it — and transcendent of that.

Access to this grace isn’t mediated by its availability, note. Because this grace is an ambient characteristic of reality. It’s largely mediated by the courage to be gracious ourselves. To be kind and yielding (especially because of our faults). To not know for sure. To have “beginner mind.” To be fierce, but knowing our imperfection all the while. To try to do everything with an awareness of God’s continual loving regard — nearer than our hands and feet.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul says it’s God’s kindness that leads us to repentance. I recently read somebody say that, in his letters, you can hear Paul trying to sort out what he’s been initiated into, and I think that’s a good way to think about Paul. And I think that’s a good way to think about Christianity, and about spirituality in general. But I think this idea ought to track for all of us.

God’s kindness leads us.

This is what fills Julian of Norwich’s assertion, “All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Her words burst with the awareness of that God has personal nature.

God’s kindness turns us around. A personal ground is a ground that knows, nurtures, negotiates, relates. A personal ground is a ground that always saves.

Much suffering is based in not knowing where we really are.

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(This essay continues a series that begins here.)

As we’ve said, if the Absolute is a willful, volitional consciousness, the implication is that the ground of reality relates to its manifestation as a personal Being. The near-death literature is full of references that flesh this out especially vividly, and there are many books that are worth reading: My Descent into Death by Howard Storm, Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani, Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, The Application of Impossible Things by Natalie Sudman, etc., etc. I think Betty Jean Eadie does a particularly good job of talking about God in her books, Embraced by the Light, The Awakening Heart, and The Ripple Effect, but it’s hard to represent what’s good by quoting her. You have to sort of catch the vibe by reading her books. (And you could finish Embraced by the Light in the course of a slow afternoon.)

Here’s psychotherapist Mike Rosenbush writing about what near-death experiences teach us about God. The Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) has collected more than 4,000 accounts of consciousness at the threshold, or having “crossed over” in death, and Rosenbush says 303 of these accounts include either a direct encounter with God or with Jesus,1 and he pulls out the following significant characteristics of these encounters.

• God is the ultimate unity of all being.

• God is loving, conscious presence.

• God is the source and sustainer of all life.

• God discerns, but doesn’t judge.

According to Rosenbush, it’s not at all fair to say that the majority of near-death experiences that include God affirm the full set of these characteristics. But one of the things that stands out to me (of course) is the personal aspect of the encounters. Rosenbush says that one third of those 303 NDEs from NDERF described God as a living light; almost one third described God in terms of an experience of love, often saying that it was hard to put into words.

These qualities are not faceless, they’re aspects of a ground that we can relate to. If the higher realms are places of love, can there be love without regard? Can there be love without a lover?

I think about the concept of holiness this way, too. If God is personal then holiness must be attributes of the divine exemplar. It’s a way to conceive of God’s “character.”

I grew up with the idea that holiness more or less begins and ends with mortification, the transcendence of earthly attachments. The Catholic church we attended seemed arid and juiceless to me. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I started to realize that, if God is the Absolute, then a) nothing could be more satisfying than God, and b) anything that was appealing was a diffraction or a reflection of that inherent desirability of God.

This idea of the personality of the absolute isn’t juiceless at all. It’s the source of all life and satisfaction. Seeking an encounter with God inherently reveals that God’s rewards transcends the rewards of attachments — much like regularly eating well-sourced, well-prepared food will make it impossible to consistently eat, say, McDonald’s.

The pursuit of holiness on earth is complicated, though, because the experience of God is so occluded — which is why there’s such a wide diversity of views about the existence and nature of God in the first place. It’s somewhat unavoidable to experience God’s richness in these diffracted forms, and to be drawn to them.

Last week, I wrote about the Christian origins of humanism, and how humanism was a reset of life-constricting ideas about Church authority and piety. In a theistic reality, there is clearly directionality in existence — a path toward divine nature and a path away from it. But too rigid an emphasis on this idea reduces everything to black and white, and that’s clearly not what life is meant to be.

I recently rediscovered a poem I wrote about ten years ago:

You might think that you got a white set of clothes,
wobbly boards through flats of mud,
with lilies and trellis some distance ahead:
(i.e., the Goal).

How do you want to look,
when you arrive,
child?

But maybe you got a bunch of paints
and some paper.
And somewhere there’s a whisper,

I am in the mud,
and the cloth.
You are an artist.
A toothy cub.
A fusion star.

So, paint, paint!
It has never been about things that do not touch.
Leave the smock on the hook,
use your body.

Whatever you use will learn.

How many canvases do you think I have?
How much paint?
How much time?

But it’s not like we don’t have to struggle. It seems clear to me that developing toward holiness is a process of unfolding the God-like seed in each of us. And it seems clear that this involves both mortification and sanctification — both a “no” and a “yes.”

It’s important that the “no” not become such an emphasis that it constricts the very idea of “yes.” Because in the end, “no” is uninhabitable. It only cleans the room of what you’re saying “yes” to.

But we mustn’t be too glib about the tension between the attached, earth-muddy part of ourselves and the highest light. It was rather later in life that I began to learn that there’s a difference between authenticity and hedonism — which is, perhaps, a lesson that the entirety of American culture is in the process of re-learning.

If we’re not careful, there can be real spiritual rupture and wounding — deep, difficult damage to our relationship with the Absolute. Emanuel Swedenborg cautions that some souls leaving the body find themselves so alienated from the light that they eventually choose away from it, and sometimes the encounter with perfect Being is, at least initially, traumatic.

I’m reminded of the book Nine Days in Heaven, which is a 150-year-old account of the experience of Marietta Davis, rewritten in contemporary language. Marietta Davis says that when she experienced the unfiltered glory of higher realms it so overwhelmed her that she fled from it. (She said she was pursued by angelic beings who asked her why she was running away.) It seems to me that it’s important neither to ignore these tensions, nor grip them utterly.

In this territory, the Gospel is a remedy. Imagine Jesus hanging out with tax collectors and sinners. Imagine Jesus, as son of God, crucified for the willing sake of sustaining a connection between God and humans. These stories do a pretty good job of communicating the idea that God doesn’t give up on us. But they also don’t make light of the stakes.

I’ve come to understand that, perhaps above all, it’s important to live toward God in a fully authentic way, holding none of our inner nature back. If we are divinely made and we are completely circumscribed by the divine, it’s important to let the divine always do its fullest work in us. If God is personal, then it’s important to be swamped in the vastness of this personality and, similarly, the vastness of holiness. Much genuine, juicy virtue can be lost in our ideas about virtue and, also, we can be lost if we aren’t continually reaching for the original Signal.

Maybe it really all reduces to relationship. I wonder how much all of attachment can be explained in terms of Buber’s I-It versus I-Thou:

All of that that degrades is unhealthy emphasis on I-It.

All that redeems is I-Thou.

There is a guiding idea of radiant, perfect Being, circumscribing all things and bent perpetually in relationship toward us. But our imagination for God must not be limited. And the way to keep our imagination for God from being limited is to spend time thinking about God, and trying to connect with God. And then to anchor this effort in the material world by getting together with people who are doing the same and talking about it.

Also, thinking about God is not handling an abstraction. When we turn our attention to God, we’re turning our attention to That which is more awake to every moment than we are. What we start regarding has been actively regarding us this whole time, inviting us to Its ways. His ways. Her ways.

His ways, Her ways, here amidst the fragrant, loamy, and slightly dangerous mud of the Earth. There is much mystery above us and around us. I think we find fullness by extending fully, in many directions.

Just a few thoughts.

Happy Easter. :)

(This series continues here.)

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(This essay continues a series that begins here.)

After having made, over the past few months, a case for the validity of a theistic personalism, the past few weeks I’ve been exploring some of the practical advantages of a personal concept of divinity — the idea that God manifests as, relates to us as, and can be related to as an absolute, cosmic “Thou.” Two weeks ago, I looked at the idea that theistic personalism underscores human dignity in unique ways. And last week we started talking about the idea that theistic personalism is uniquely useful for establishing moral coherence.

There’s certainly more that could be said about the ways relating to a personal God offers distinct advantages at the moral and social level.1 In the meantime, it occurred to me that it might be worth exploring one of the most compelling apparent counter-arguments: namely, Europe.

A sprawling diversity of culture, Europe is generally more secular-humanist than the U.S.2 There’s been a significant turning away not only from religious institutions, but the whole idea of spiritual, “supernatural” thinking altogether. Meanwhile, European countries have fairly low crime rates (especially violent crime), and their judicial systems tend to rank among the highest according to rating agencies like the World Justice Project. Western European countries in particular have high rates of literacy and high percentages of citizens with “tertiary degrees.” Western Europe is also evincing some of the most mature behavior in the world, I would argue, when it comes to responding to climate change and to the underlying consumption crisis. And, of course, the Nordic countries famously top those world “happiness” lists year after year.

Likely nothing is more exemplary of the success of European secularism than the “Nordic model,” in fact — the “high trust” social contract of the Scandinavian countries. The Nordics have become increasingly idealized as happy, peaceful, prosperous places, and their success is largely attributed to a humanist Bildung (or character formation) movement, originally a German idea that was earnestly undertaken in Scandinavia in the 19th and 20th centuries, as detailed in Lene Rachel Andersen and Thomas Bjorkman’s book The Nordic Secret.

It certainly seems like secular humanism provides a solid core for the formation of healthy, cohesive, progressive culture — which then lacks, y’know, inquisitions, crusades, fundamentalism, pietist scourges, and so on. And I wouldn’t necessarily argue that it isn’t the case that secular humanism can work over the long term.

But I have to admit, I’m suspicious. Mainly, because I wonder how much you can separate any of this European success from a personalist theism in the first place. Really any of it.

As Lene Andersen and Thomas Bjorkman point out, the Nordic folk-Bildung movement was rooted in the legacy of European humanism, tracing back to the early sixteenth century or so. And these days, when you say “humanism,” you tend to think of something naturalistic or secular: The ideological center is humanity’s goodness, inherent dignity, and potential. Humanism is associated with the effort to create a good world apart from any supernatural premises. It’s associated with the oft-memed atheist argument: “I don’t need the threat of hell to be a good person.”

But this isn’t at all what humanism started out to be, and I think you could make a case that this isn’t what humanism inherently is, either. The early focus on humanity was not intended to restore human dignity by retrieving humans from an imaginary relationship with an imaginary God; it was intended to restore human dignity by retrieving humans from a religious machine that was losing its soul — in order to re-establish humans in healthy relationship with God, as children of God.

The “O.G.” humanists

Take, for example, Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly, which he supposedly wrote over a couple of days while traveling with Thomas More in 1509. In the voice of the archetypal goddess, Folly, Erasmus gambols through all the stations of human life, high and low, noting the foolishness in each. The playful and lyrical tone of the essay makes clear how inevitable this folly is, but also how the color of life emerges from it. This color is divine, in its way. Humans are glorious in their imperfection, because all folly is liberated in cosmic love.

And then take his companion piece, the Enchiridion, a more serious manual on human formation published a few years earlier, in 1503. Humans are free to be fallible, but it’s compassionate to try to cultivate ourselves — and to cultivate one another.

All of this is highly human-affirming. But it’s also highly theistic. The momentum upward is toward a perfect Being, and the freedom to fail occurs within the auspices of this perfect Being. We are too foolish to truly save ourselves — and yet, also, we can help ourselves. And the existence of a perfect God above all is what makes this ultimately comic and not tragic.

Or consider Oration on the Dignity of Man, by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of the foundational manifestos of the Renaissance, written a few decades earlier, in 1486. After creating the universe and assigning its beings to all the archetypal stations, from the heavenly to the debased, God creates humanity last, and God realizes that there is no original archetype left to assign to humans.

I think it’s worth taking in some of Pico’s voice here. These are long quotes in old-school language, but I think they’re worth reading for the sake of an overall point:

God the Father, the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divinity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur.

But . . .

Truth was, however, that there remained no archetype according to which He might fashion a new offspring, nor in His treasure-houses the wherewithal to endow a new son with a fitting inheritance, nor any place, among the seats of the universe, where this new creature might dispose himself to contemplate the world. All space was already filled; all things had been distributed in the highest, the middle and the lowest orders.

So, to humans, God says:

"We have given you, Oh Adam; no visage proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision . . . I have placed you at the very center of the world . . . We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer . . ."

This is a beautiful way to frame the human condition, and you can sense the zeitgeist of the coming Renaissance in it. There’s a marked course correction from what was the prevailing spirit. But notice what the course correction is: It’s not from a theistic way of looking at things to a “naturalistic” way of looking at things. It’s away from a life-constricting kind of pietism toward an empowered exploration of the cosmos, orchestrated through divine generosity.

Humanism is a turn away from a spirituality with such an emphasis on the perfect light that everything else turns dark. And it’s a turn away from such an emphasis on divinity that the dignity of human agency gets erased. But it doesn’t depart from theism. It revives it.

For centuries, humanist theories of development remained a celebration of our progress from the bizarre stations we find ourselves in toward the highest light — with an insistence that this progression be a dignified, redeemed process, no matter where it begins — because it all occurs under the auspices of divine love.

Three hundred years after Erasmus and Pico, it’s a Lutheran pastor, N. F. S. Grundtvig, who becomes the prophet of Nordic Bildung. After spending a night questioning his Christian faith and fighting what he deemed to be a literal battle with the devil, Grundtvig is inspired to reinvigorate the faith of the Danes, again re-defining not away from theism, but away from the deadness of the existing church.

As Andersen and Bjorkman tell it, Grundtvig realized:

[I[t is God’s intent that each people should grow its own spirit. There is thus no conflict between the Danes’ Viking heritage with its Norse mythology and Christianity, as long as the church is a church of the people growing from the people and its spirit. Rather than seeing the Bible as the source of Christianity, it is every community around Jesus and the oral traditions developing in them, the flavor and history of each individual people, that to Grundtvig is the source of true Christianity. From the merging of each people’s spirit and the Holy Ghost (or maybe they are in fact the same?) emerges locally meaningful Christianity in the hearts of any people.3

Again, not a revolution away from theism, but a revival. It brings the self-determining powers, and the local, personal sensibilities of the individual forward, but it still situates this pro-human regard in the pursuit of a divine ideal.

This is in 1810. Grundtvig gradually evolves his revival into a spiritually-undergirded human development movement. Within decades, Nordic folk-Bildung is on its way.

You can’t beat the pathos

It should be clear that nothing infuses the human condition with archetypal power like these divinely illumined stories. Nothing nearly this radiant comes from a cosmos based in quarks and protons. Physicalism is alienating not only because it’s devoid of ultimate relationship, but because it’s ultimately devoid of the highest lyricism, too.

Meanwhile, secular Europe continues to mine its theistic past. In that 2017 Pew study mentioned in the footnotes, though only 22% of Europeans attended church, 71% percent identified as “Christian,” suggesting a rise of a “cultural Christianity,” which reminds of the “Christian atheism” that Zizek supposes should be a guiding light for the future. There’s a clear understanding that there’s something inherently valuable in Christianity’s infrastructure, even if there’s something that people also want to get away from.

But maybe we can see a colossal error here, which is the presumption that Christianity can be better understood by today’s secularists than by its theistic founder, known to his followers as “The Anointed.”

To be clear, I’m not talking about Jesus exclusively. I’m talking about this principle of avatarhood in general. Let’s include Buddha, and Krishna appearing to Arjuna, and Shankara, and Ibn Sina, and others. (Though I’m also not saying that Jesus wasn’t the greatest.)

Do note: These folks weren’t theorists. Their definitive, sometimes world-resetting ideology came from revelations occurring at the deepest level of being. At the very least, we must see that world-resetting ideology is not achieved casually. Prophets are engaged in intensive inner, metaphysical work.

At the very least, we can be suspicious of a secularism that is not rooted in deep forms of contemplation. You can’t just read authors. You need someone to read the deep texture of reality.

. . . Which, mostly, secularism doesn’t, and secularists don’t.

And past this, again, I think you can’t escape the power of those cosmic archetypes, like a personal divine. A personal divine is more resonant. It’s more idealistic. And at its best it’s also more habitable. In this model, we are called to the heights and, also, we can’t help but to be children relative to those heights. It’s luminous, challenging, liberating, and nurturing all at the same time.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear how resilient secular humanism proves to be in the face of the meaning crisis. Europeans struggle with loneliness, and the problem is accelerating especially rapidly among the youth.4 Also, there’s reason to suspect that ostensible measures of satisfaction may be masking a deeper void of real purpose.5 And negative correlations with religious participation, at least, have been observed. When people leave the churches, they don’t meet anywhere else quite as effectively. And efforts like Alain de Botton’s School of Life, which set out to be a sort of church for atheists, don’t seem to cohere in quite the same way.

Why is that? Is it because life is just getting harder, independent of the ideological basis of society? (Blame it all on the phones, maybe?) Or is it more that these secular efforts are actually synthetic, lacking a true cohesive core?

Is secular humanism a grown-up approach to reality, ready to discard the childish rind of myth from which it emerged? Or is secular humanism “living off the interest” of something that it can neither generate itself, nor sustain?

Explorers carried away

This isn’t meant to be a polemic against secular humanism. Let a diversity of views air and interact. But maybe, at its core, humanism is still seeking what it has always been seeking — which isn’t simply liberation from theism because theism is freighted with bad religion? Maybe it’s seeking liberation from the bad religion, yes, but toward a life-giving, personally transformative, and community-fortified perception of an archetypal, and theistic reality?

It’s like the humanists stepped out of the religious container all those centuries ago — rightly, because the container was getting too stuffy — and then along the way the whole effort was hit by the bus of scientism. The church was beating people up, so humanists looked down at humanity, and when they looked up they found physicists scrubbing divinity from the sky. (Then, before they knew it, they were all entrenched in universities, where secular humanism appeared to be the only “permissible” choice.)

Meanwhile, I think you simply can’t deny the pathos of a relational cosmology within a personal Absolute. I think you can’t help but wonder whether anything so life-giving can come from any other narrative.

And if so, then there’s just one last little step to take. If this narrative of a relational personal Absolute is so pathos-filled and life-giving, then there just remains to entertain that it’s powerful for a very simple reason:

It’s powerful because it orbits something deeply, absolutely real.

(This series continues here.)

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