More Than Words: A Thank You and Introduction

Column by Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin on 26 January 2017 21 Comments

It's interesting, I love reading Spong now for the exact opposite reason I first loved reading Spong.

Let me explain.

I've been a devout Christian my entire life. From the somewhat conservative thinking Greystone Baptist Church of my childhood to the progressive thinking Presbyterian Church of the Covenant where I currently serve as Interim minister I have never lost my “soul deep” belief in God.

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Question

Thanks, Kevin, for the article.  How wonderful to know Bishop Spong and write about him with deep appreciation.  The article brought to mind how difficult it was to have students who came to campus ministry to buttress up doctrines and beliefs when those aspects of the Faith were not the most meaningful to me.  I found discussions about conforming to a particular theological ‘rule’ painful because the academic setting was already challenging so many students’ world views and students were in so much distress.  Many of those students left for more conservative campus ministry groups.  The ones who stayed agreed to disagree and/or found common ground with our group.  Often students who stayed with the ministry would continue to try to change the direction of the group towards conformity to their point of view.  It was challenging because there was continual tension.  Being retired is great because there isn’t that tension.  The down side is not being invited into a young generation and understanding the Faith from their perspective.  It was exciting and fun to learn from the young adults that the church had nurtured and sent on to college.

How do you communicate compassion for those who find meaning and comfort in doctrine and belief while at the same time being uncomfortable with faith based on doctrine and belief?

Answer

Dear Margie,

The deepest longing of the human soul is to know the truth of who she is; to know immediately and directly that Being is her being. Within the spiritual tradition this longing is spoken of as the desire to know our true self, or in the Christian tradition, our Christ-self. The Delphic oracle spoke this most ancient wisdom by reminding us to “know thyself”. To not know who we are, often spoke of as being lost in a veil of tears, is the deepest suffering we each can experience. I begin here because all too often popular culture misconstrues the meaning of compassion.

According to the wisdom tradition, compassion does not mean that we try to take away someone’s soulful suffering (indeed, there may be good reason for it); although that is how it is so often understood in pastoral care. Rather, we can appreciate compassion as having to do with being faithful to our journey into the heartland of truth, whatever the cost. This heartland journey of the soul is one in which the Spirit continually invites us to see through the veils, obscurations, misunderstandings, that cloud our vision and confuse our heart; it is often painful work to see through our identifications and attachments, because it often feels as if our survival is at stake. And in a sense it is. Most of us would much rather grow without changing a bit, which is simply how the ego is. In truth, for us to authentically grow we cannot cling to who we have taken ourselves to be. The purpose of spiritual maturation is neither to accept or reject a particular doctrine or belief, but to grow in our understanding of ourselves as a person who thirsts to know the truth of who we are.

Within this vision, a spiritual guide is someone who encourages us to risk the journey of becoming an adult. After all, the question Jesus asks his friends, “who do you say that I am,” is a variation of the Delphic oracle – who do each of us say, or understand, ourselves to be? The dominant form of religion has done a great disservice in abandoning this spiritual journey for the thin and barren land of propositional doctrine and creedal belief. As a result, as Jacob Needleman wrote so clearly late last century, it has become lost. Our youth suffer the consequences, because all too often, in the matters of spirituality and inquiry, we have left them to fend for themselves as adults with the spiritual tools of childhood. We would not settle for the study of geometry, or biology, or music, to remain stunted with Euclid, Emilie du Chatelet or Mendel, or Pythagoras; all great thinkers, but their fields continue to evolve and flourish. Yet, in essence, that is what tends to happen with our youth. They have been reared on biblical literalism through bible study, worship, hymnody, prayer and preaching. The existential crisis they experience at university, in many respects, is healthy and utterly necessary, if they are to become adults.

The inadequately expressed doctrines and beliefs concerning such matters as creation, virgin birth, incarnation, original sin, are unnecessarily rigid and confining containers strangling the deepest longings of the maturing human heart. Again, the point of spiritual education is not to accept or reject but to understand with our heart, our mind, and our body. Our souls yearn with every fiber of their being to experience the confluence of science and spirituality, language and art, history and ritual. The human soul simply cannot thrive on a segmented life. Authentic compassion flows from the realization that Being itself is the Holy Source inviting the soul to question and inquire without end, because the Mystery itself is inexhaustible.

~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

 

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