Charting the New Reformation, Part XIV – The Third Thesis: “Original Sin” Pre-Darwinian Mythology – Post Darwinian Nonsense (Continued)

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 24 March 2016 33 Comments
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Question

I have only just found your work and in the last couple of months have read three of your books and there are two more on my shelf waiting for me. It is hard to express how grateful I am and how much it means. I had heard your name back in the early 90s when my world crashed down around my ears, but since my parents were fundamentalists, it wasn’t something I could pick up off the bookshelf. It is too late for me to find belief again, but even so the 30 years old pain that has directed so much of my life is finally finding some relief. A short background: for the first 25 years of my life, my faith was the foundation of my entire being. It was only when I found myself running away from my husband, who was violent to my children, that I suddenly came crashing against something I had never had to look at before – that the church insisted that the reality was not what I could see in front of my face, but only what they could imagine was the “real’ existence in the heavenly realm. So for the first time, I was brutally confronted with a division between God and truth. I had always thought they were the same thing. My God was truth so the church fell away from me (in fact I was asked not to come any more). My parents agreed with the church and sided with my husband. (My father even suggested that I should be exorcised). So I was 25, naïve with three children under five with no community, no family, trying to find air in the vacuum. I tried here and there to find a framework for my profound spirituality. Eventually I just wore out and literally drifted away, leaving everything behind me. I had nothing to give me reality. I lost my children because suicide attempts don’t look good in custody courts. They went back to live with their father with devastating consequences. Two of them now, as adults, never even speak to their father (or go anywhere near a church). I am sure this is a horror story often repeated in the history of the church. For me, my entire journey is about losing truth. I know now that I will never recover from that loss. The God-shaped hole is ferocious in my case and I cannot fill it. Right now I cannot find anything to believe in at all. Not love, not hope, not relationships, not anything; perhaps respect, perhaps that is all. So now my task is to deal with the death of truth and to find a way to walk forward anyway. So to read your work is almost, almost enough. To see that the truth I was fed was not even true on its own terms. To see that there are people who can find truth while looking at the damage of the church full in the face and naming the lies as such. To sense your great compassion for those who left or were left, even though it mattered more than anything. Somehow your work makes it ok. If I had had access to it 25-30 years ago, I would not be where I am now. I would probably be in exile as your term perfectly captures it. I would not have had to lose truth; but it’s ok anyway. It gives me some strength. A way to hold up my head, a way to stop crying to the long invisible people, who were so wrong about what truth was – to put that finally to rest. To know that it is not up to them. Somehow I still needed to know that it wasn’t true. That I was actually ok. I hope you have understood something of what I am trying to say.

Answer

Dear Krysztyna,

Thank you for your letter. It was one of the hardest and most honest letters I have ever been asked to read. Religion can be and has been a cruel force in the lives of a number of people, but what your letter does is to put a face on it. I apologize to you for what well-meaning, but deeply uninformed people, have done to you in the name of the Christ I serve. I hope you can find a loving community in which to live, in which your wounds can be bound up and you can find yourself free to grow for which you obviously have great potential. In my experience the church that does that best both intentionally and actually is called Unity. I do not know where you live, but if there is a Unity Church near you, I invite you to try it for a period of time. More than any other denominational movement I know this church accepts people as they are and then loves them into being all that they can be. You have so much to offer that I would hate for you not to discover this and then not to give others a chance to receive your gifts in a community of worship.

I hope to hear from you again.

Live well!
John Shelby Spong

 

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33 thoughts on “Charting the New Reformation, Part XIV – The Third Thesis: “Original Sin” Pre-Darwinian Mythology – Post Darwinian Nonsense (Continued)

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