Big Field. Bright Light.
Tonight I had a lovely conversation with a couple friends of mine from about 5:30pm to 1am. They both claim to have had relatively few conversations in which they have been asked things like, "What games did you play as a child?" or "Who do you think Jesus is?," so it was a very interesting few hours.
It wasn't all about theology, though large chunks of it were. We talked about places we've visited and our schools and our childhoods and siblings and such things. They were both at a loss as to what "regular guys" (as opposed to nerds and geeks) do with their time, and we spent probably half an hour in conjecture over that. Eventually, though, we got into an extended conversation about personal faith stories and the identity of Jesus and nature of salvation and the relation of non-Christian worldview to Truth. If you've read my blogs, you know how this sort of discussion regularly goes.
But they understood what I said. Not only did they understand what I said, but I understood them, and resonated with what they said. And they did a proportional share of the talking. They each shared brilliant ideas. Because we'd heard each other's faith stories, more or less, we understood more or less how the others were used to thinking and speaking, and because neither of them are entrenched in theology, neither of them are inextricably bound to Church jargon. They both easily understood and reciprocated the desire for Christianese to be "translated" into more understandable, subjectively-appropriable vocabulary, and gladly (in complete volition) spoke in the new terms we came to lay out for the entire conversation.
The meat of our discussion concerned a big analogy, a visual system, if you will, meant to represent an understanding of salvation, our relation to God and Truth, and Jesus' purpose as "savior." Imagine an almost infinitely expansive field with a light in the middle bright enough to obscure the source of that light. We walk around in this field, toward and away from the light, on different paths, toward and away from mirrors, through clouds of fog and smoke, around thorny patches and rocks, trying to get closer to the light. For the purpose of discussion, the light is simply Truth, in whatever state the individual has identified it to be, but it's meant to represent the objective reality on an existential framework. God. Peace. Oneness. Nirvana. Heaven. Truth. Rest. Understanding. Life. All or none or some of that, depending on how you define things. Regardless, because the light is so bright and so many things are in the field, it becomes very complicated to walk straight toward the light, although most of us probably want to.
The act of walking toward the light is harmony; it is sinlessness; sanctification, holiness, peace, dharma. What we called it was "being in accord with the law of the universe." No one ever reaches the light, so everyone's equally clueless about what it actually is. No one knows what it is that hasn't been there. (The idea was tossed out there that people in the Bible that ascended directly into heaven instead of dying had reached the light. I'm not sure I feel that I have a great enough understanding of ascension to affirm or negate that suggestion, but it was interesting.) When we started fishing around for the implications of this fact, it became pretty clear pretty fast that we think a lot of things, but we don't know anything. If you think this is obvious, you evidently haven't been told by tons of people all the time that we do. It's a popular idea within Christianity to say that we know that Jesus is the Christ, the sun of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary... etc. But at the beginning of that creed is that one crucially important word that makes it a creed: crēdō. According to the expansive, omniscient source of Wikitionary, the word "crēdō" comes from a Proto-Indo European phrase meaning "to place one's heart." A creed is about commitment; it's about worldview; it's about finding a label for something going on inside. Creeds cannot know. People saying creeds cannot know. (If you're asking yourself whether I think I know that I can't know... shush. This is also a theory. Just a theory. A freakishly well-supported theory. Many well-supported theories exist, and I try to believe them, with the knowledge that I have an imperfect success rate. I've heard so many annoying arguments against "post-modernism" trying to condemn all belief in subjective reality with this. Just don't. Pick a different argument.)
What does it mean to believe, then? It means to point somewhere and say, HEY LOOK. THAT'S BRIGHT. LET'S GO THERE. What does it mean to disbelieve? HEY LOOK, A DARK SPOT. LET'S AVOID THAT. What does it mean to follow some kind of reflection of the light that legitimately looked like the light and eventually bump your head into a mirror? ...erm, complicated. What does it mean to avoid moving a certain direction because the path seems obscured by a gigantic cavern or poisonous spiky mean-looking plants or a huge foggy cloud? Maybe a lapse in faith. Probably smart. We rested on that last thought for a second, because it has pretty important implications.
If everyone's trying to go to the light and no one goes straight and no one reaches the light and everyone knows the light but know one really knows it....... what is salvation? What is judgment? What is hell? We went in circles for a little bit, none of us really making any confident suggestions. Eventually, we decided that our uncertainty was present with reason, and that there's no point in trying to conceive of Light and Dark without Field when all we've ever known is Field. We understand the concepts of light and darkness because we've been exposed to their existence, but we don't know anything about them as they exist separate from our experience. What is heaven? I DUNNO. What is hell? I DUNNO. Then why do you believe in it? 'CAUSE... wait, why do I care about Heaven and Hell? ....Oh yeah, because they're really great extrinsic motivators to live a good life without actually caring about serving God, pursuing Truth, or loving people. I would completely change the way I'm living if I knew I was going one way or the other. That's why it's crucially important to have a perfectly-delineated personal eschatology. Also, the reason we find it necessary to reference the doctrine of trinity in everything is that we totally understand the difference between the "Father" and "Spirit," the reality of Jesus' divinity, and what it means for God to have parts. Also because we don't see God through anything but our understandings of these three pieces of the Trinity and we can't understand why other people don't have a triune God. These dogmas are primally importance to our faiths.
Please try to pardon my sarcasm if you're offended by it. I honestly don't mean to say that these things are totally pointless under all frameworks, and if they're relevant to you, I am in full confidence that you have your reasons. It's just that at this point in the conversation, we'd realized that it's really pretty pointless under our own frameworks to have decided what exactly sends you to heaven and what sends you to hell; who to "evangelize" to and who's saved; who's "Christian" and who's not; who's "in" and who's "out;" exactly how different things fit together. No two people walk exactly the same path. No two people say the light's in exactly the same place, and if they did, we couldn't tell, because they're all using their fingers to point. And everything they're pointing to are signs or general directions.
We decided that if the point of a Christ is to grant passage to the Light, then Jesus must be a big ol' sign post pointing toward the light. It's hard to represent Jesus' divinity (or supposed divinity, depending on your perspective) with this model, but practically, immediately, in real time, this is how he functions. As a "Way" for us to find God, to get closer to him, to relate to and understand and love him. He functions as a capstone on the Hebrew scriptures, or so goes the argument: that this serves as evidence of God's incredible and kind of freaky complexity, his non-contingency. These are things I've always known about God, so it makes sense to me in some ways that Jesus would break the natural order in some way or another. The Spirit I know is the kind of Spirit that would do something totally counter-nature, but that makes sense, is more complex than should be possible, and is relevant to us, to bring us into closer relation with it. I'm very drawn by the Christian claim because the concept of a sacrificial servant honestly makes sense to me. It intrigues me. Gotta say, though, I don't understand Jesus - even the most basic stuff about his nature - and I never will. I'm not quite gnostic enough to say that flesh is bad, but it's certainly very limited, if only by time and space, and so I'm forced to live with the idea that "both God and man" is an oversimplification of vast proportions. I'm also forced by evidence and conviction to live with the idea that it's just an oversimplification... and that it is true, somehow. The latter is the part that I'm still trying to figure out what to do with.
If this is the area of thought we're engaging, then the standard (well, restrictive and mainstream) conception of "Christian dogma" really has to be questioned. At this point in the discussion, we'd agreed that it's necessary to try to remain agnostic about big metaphysical beliefs you haven't consciously and purposefully committed yourself to; we'd agreed that other faiths are potentially-valid attempts to seek the Light; that non-Christian walks are important sources of wisdom for Christians because they might be seeing something of the Light that we're not; that it's extremely important to be able to translate equivalent meanings from one worldview/religion/culture to another for maximum common ground and understanding. Because we're never going to reach the destination while we're still on the journey, the reaching Light can't be the point of life. What should be important is coming together to understand and commune and love each other. To stand in awe at this God-Spirit-Truth-Sentience thing that we all have such different understandings of, and to be thankful. To live in cycles of joyful tension, of peaceful chaos; those paradoxes are what have governed my whole faith journey. The highs and the lows, the best of times, the worst of times. This is the point of life. Experience. We were given life for life. And that experience seems to follow a straighter line toward Light, from my perspective, when we live in perspective and self-awareness and prayer. Those are things that lend themselves to peace. And peace... well, I imagine there's a lot of it burning at the center of that Light.
It wasn't all about theology, though large chunks of it were. We talked about places we've visited and our schools and our childhoods and siblings and such things. They were both at a loss as to what "regular guys" (as opposed to nerds and geeks) do with their time, and we spent probably half an hour in conjecture over that. Eventually, though, we got into an extended conversation about personal faith stories and the identity of Jesus and nature of salvation and the relation of non-Christian worldview to Truth. If you've read my blogs, you know how this sort of discussion regularly goes.
But they understood what I said. Not only did they understand what I said, but I understood them, and resonated with what they said. And they did a proportional share of the talking. They each shared brilliant ideas. Because we'd heard each other's faith stories, more or less, we understood more or less how the others were used to thinking and speaking, and because neither of them are entrenched in theology, neither of them are inextricably bound to Church jargon. They both easily understood and reciprocated the desire for Christianese to be "translated" into more understandable, subjectively-appropriable vocabulary, and gladly (in complete volition) spoke in the new terms we came to lay out for the entire conversation.
The meat of our discussion concerned a big analogy, a visual system, if you will, meant to represent an understanding of salvation, our relation to God and Truth, and Jesus' purpose as "savior." Imagine an almost infinitely expansive field with a light in the middle bright enough to obscure the source of that light. We walk around in this field, toward and away from the light, on different paths, toward and away from mirrors, through clouds of fog and smoke, around thorny patches and rocks, trying to get closer to the light. For the purpose of discussion, the light is simply Truth, in whatever state the individual has identified it to be, but it's meant to represent the objective reality on an existential framework. God. Peace. Oneness. Nirvana. Heaven. Truth. Rest. Understanding. Life. All or none or some of that, depending on how you define things. Regardless, because the light is so bright and so many things are in the field, it becomes very complicated to walk straight toward the light, although most of us probably want to.
The act of walking toward the light is harmony; it is sinlessness; sanctification, holiness, peace, dharma. What we called it was "being in accord with the law of the universe." No one ever reaches the light, so everyone's equally clueless about what it actually is. No one knows what it is that hasn't been there. (The idea was tossed out there that people in the Bible that ascended directly into heaven instead of dying had reached the light. I'm not sure I feel that I have a great enough understanding of ascension to affirm or negate that suggestion, but it was interesting.) When we started fishing around for the implications of this fact, it became pretty clear pretty fast that we think a lot of things, but we don't know anything. If you think this is obvious, you evidently haven't been told by tons of people all the time that we do. It's a popular idea within Christianity to say that we know that Jesus is the Christ, the sun of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary... etc. But at the beginning of that creed is that one crucially important word that makes it a creed: crēdō. According to the expansive, omniscient source of Wikitionary, the word "crēdō" comes from a Proto-Indo European phrase meaning "to place one's heart." A creed is about commitment; it's about worldview; it's about finding a label for something going on inside. Creeds cannot know. People saying creeds cannot know. (If you're asking yourself whether I think I know that I can't know... shush. This is also a theory. Just a theory. A freakishly well-supported theory. Many well-supported theories exist, and I try to believe them, with the knowledge that I have an imperfect success rate. I've heard so many annoying arguments against "post-modernism" trying to condemn all belief in subjective reality with this. Just don't. Pick a different argument.)
What does it mean to believe, then? It means to point somewhere and say, HEY LOOK. THAT'S BRIGHT. LET'S GO THERE. What does it mean to disbelieve? HEY LOOK, A DARK SPOT. LET'S AVOID THAT. What does it mean to follow some kind of reflection of the light that legitimately looked like the light and eventually bump your head into a mirror? ...erm, complicated. What does it mean to avoid moving a certain direction because the path seems obscured by a gigantic cavern or poisonous spiky mean-looking plants or a huge foggy cloud? Maybe a lapse in faith. Probably smart. We rested on that last thought for a second, because it has pretty important implications.
If everyone's trying to go to the light and no one goes straight and no one reaches the light and everyone knows the light but know one really knows it....... what is salvation? What is judgment? What is hell? We went in circles for a little bit, none of us really making any confident suggestions. Eventually, we decided that our uncertainty was present with reason, and that there's no point in trying to conceive of Light and Dark without Field when all we've ever known is Field. We understand the concepts of light and darkness because we've been exposed to their existence, but we don't know anything about them as they exist separate from our experience. What is heaven? I DUNNO. What is hell? I DUNNO. Then why do you believe in it? 'CAUSE... wait, why do I care about Heaven and Hell? ....Oh yeah, because they're really great extrinsic motivators to live a good life without actually caring about serving God, pursuing Truth, or loving people. I would completely change the way I'm living if I knew I was going one way or the other. That's why it's crucially important to have a perfectly-delineated personal eschatology. Also, the reason we find it necessary to reference the doctrine of trinity in everything is that we totally understand the difference between the "Father" and "Spirit," the reality of Jesus' divinity, and what it means for God to have parts. Also because we don't see God through anything but our understandings of these three pieces of the Trinity and we can't understand why other people don't have a triune God. These dogmas are primally importance to our faiths.
Please try to pardon my sarcasm if you're offended by it. I honestly don't mean to say that these things are totally pointless under all frameworks, and if they're relevant to you, I am in full confidence that you have your reasons. It's just that at this point in the conversation, we'd realized that it's really pretty pointless under our own frameworks to have decided what exactly sends you to heaven and what sends you to hell; who to "evangelize" to and who's saved; who's "Christian" and who's not; who's "in" and who's "out;" exactly how different things fit together. No two people walk exactly the same path. No two people say the light's in exactly the same place, and if they did, we couldn't tell, because they're all using their fingers to point. And everything they're pointing to are signs or general directions.
We decided that if the point of a Christ is to grant passage to the Light, then Jesus must be a big ol' sign post pointing toward the light. It's hard to represent Jesus' divinity (or supposed divinity, depending on your perspective) with this model, but practically, immediately, in real time, this is how he functions. As a "Way" for us to find God, to get closer to him, to relate to and understand and love him. He functions as a capstone on the Hebrew scriptures, or so goes the argument: that this serves as evidence of God's incredible and kind of freaky complexity, his non-contingency. These are things I've always known about God, so it makes sense to me in some ways that Jesus would break the natural order in some way or another. The Spirit I know is the kind of Spirit that would do something totally counter-nature, but that makes sense, is more complex than should be possible, and is relevant to us, to bring us into closer relation with it. I'm very drawn by the Christian claim because the concept of a sacrificial servant honestly makes sense to me. It intrigues me. Gotta say, though, I don't understand Jesus - even the most basic stuff about his nature - and I never will. I'm not quite gnostic enough to say that flesh is bad, but it's certainly very limited, if only by time and space, and so I'm forced to live with the idea that "both God and man" is an oversimplification of vast proportions. I'm also forced by evidence and conviction to live with the idea that it's just an oversimplification... and that it is true, somehow. The latter is the part that I'm still trying to figure out what to do with.
If this is the area of thought we're engaging, then the standard (well, restrictive and mainstream) conception of "Christian dogma" really has to be questioned. At this point in the discussion, we'd agreed that it's necessary to try to remain agnostic about big metaphysical beliefs you haven't consciously and purposefully committed yourself to; we'd agreed that other faiths are potentially-valid attempts to seek the Light; that non-Christian walks are important sources of wisdom for Christians because they might be seeing something of the Light that we're not; that it's extremely important to be able to translate equivalent meanings from one worldview/religion/culture to another for maximum common ground and understanding. Because we're never going to reach the destination while we're still on the journey, the reaching Light can't be the point of life. What should be important is coming together to understand and commune and love each other. To stand in awe at this God-Spirit-Truth-Sentience thing that we all have such different understandings of, and to be thankful. To live in cycles of joyful tension, of peaceful chaos; those paradoxes are what have governed my whole faith journey. The highs and the lows, the best of times, the worst of times. This is the point of life. Experience. We were given life for life. And that experience seems to follow a straighter line toward Light, from my perspective, when we live in perspective and self-awareness and prayer. Those are things that lend themselves to peace. And peace... well, I imagine there's a lot of it burning at the center of that Light.
I love that you use the word Light. It's very Quaker of you.
ReplyDeleteTo me, though, if you want a religion/practice without metaphysics, then Buddhism is what you're looking for. The Buddha refused to address questions that were not concerned with the practical, with the business of living a life that is brightened by the Light of Enlightenment. Unfortunately, Buddhist tradition can be twisted into a practice that is entirely inwardly focused. The idea is that understanding one's basic unity with the universe will make you learn compassion and peace, but it can easily turn into self-therapy.
Buddha said something along these lines: "Those who recite the scriptures little but live by them, they are truly righteous. Those who recite the scriptures often but do not live by them, they are truly deceived."
Orthopraxy for the win.
Yeah, it's probably time I tag along and learn a bit more bout the Quakers.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy Buddhism - and eastern philosophies more generally - but I have had relatively little access to it thus far. I appreciate the stronger focus on relevant, concrete things... the movement toward "enlightenment" (in a more literal sense - I don't quite understand it as Buddhists do), but for all that I have a pretty experiential faith, I don't understand faith in terms of therapy. I still have a pretty external focus, for an 'existentialist.'
The buddha sounds a lot like Jesus.
Orthopraxy is good insofar as it's understood as a means to a greater end. I've seen it abused. But abundant overemphasis on orthodoxy frustrates me.