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What if you and I could sit across the table from each other tonight, under the stars? What would you say to me? Some people say, “I’ve read a lot of your writing, you know?”

“Yeah?” I say.

There’s not much to say after that. “Thanks” doesn’t seem to work. “That’s cool” sounds arrogant, like it’s somehow cool to have read things that I wrote. Mostly I just hold still until the moment passes.

“Is that weird?” people sometimes ask. “Is it weird to suddenly find out that some stranger knows a lot of personal stuff about you, and you don’t know anything about them?”

This really does happen to me. It happened to me last week, as a matter of fact. A guy named Gary at a coffee shop. Really great guy. English accent. We ended up talking for about two hours.

“No,” I say. “It’s not weird because I don’t think about it. It’s like it’s not happening.”

That’s the truth. It’s as if someone said, “I saw you naked two weeks ago.” Yeah? Well, you’re not seeing me naked now, so I guess it doesn’t bother me too much unless we keep talking about it.

Now if I could ask you something – anything – I would say, “Do you believe in things that we might want to be true, but for which there isn’t a lot of hard evidence, maybe no hard evidence at all?”

I’d be trying to ask if you are a faith person. Any kind of faith person. Maybe you believe in Buddha, or Jesus, or God, or Allah, or any number of other ideas about an eternal being or beings. And if it turned out you were a faith person, I’d like a follow-up question.

What kind of faith do you have?

Is it frightened faith? You need the comfort of believing in the stuff your parents taught you about God, and you’re scared shitless that someone is going to talk you out of it? That’s okay. I've been there myself. I’m just trying to figure you out.

Or is yours that kind of arrogant faith that says, “Everyone else must be a complete idiot not to have faith and believe what I believe.” I hope not, because you seem so nice. Plus, I probably don't believe what you believe, so now I'm stupid and how are we going to have a decent conversation once that's established?

Is it desperate faith? Are you trying to hold onto meaning in a world in which meaning is increasingly hard to find? Yeah, I get that. I feel you.

Is it stubborn faith, like mine? Are you just ornery enough to stare down an empty universe and say, “I DEMAND that there be meaning in these skies.” And then you stare real hard and angry right into the Milky Way. Then you laugh because of how small and silly you are. You laugh at yourself, but you keep staring. You ARE going to stare down the universe.

You know, I’d just kind of like to know what kind of faith is keeping you in the game these days.

Or.

If you’re really not a faith person – at least not so much in the obvious and traditional ways – then I’d be REALLY fascinated and want to know the whole story.

Are you the sort who has always seen the default human position as NOT believing in magic or gods or any of that stuff? In your mind the evidence would have to be pretty strong to push you away from your default position of unbelief. Maybe you’ve never been able to understand why so many see it the opposite way. Like believing in God is the default, and you’d better have a damn good reason for not believing.

See I would get that. I would so get that about you. Because I seem to see just about everything in ways that are the exact opposite of most people. I know what that’s like.

Are you a kind of arrogant, angry, “only idiots believe in God” sort of person? I hope not. Because if you are, then I’m stupid, and how are we going to have a conversation now that my stupidity is out on the table for everyone to see.

Ooh, are you one of those dreamy and courageous scientist types, who has such a rigorous epistemology that you just can’t violate it for mythic reality, no matter how beautiful the myth and no matter how old it is?

Yeah, see I find that to be romantic. I was almost you. Just…almost. Sometimes I fantasize about being you.

So when the conversation dies down and we are both left looking at the stars, wouldn’t it seem like there would be no way we could remain unchanged? For one thing it would be just the two of us sitting at our little table beneath an infinite dome of starry mystery. We’d be talking about all the possibilities of what might be. It seems like there would be no way we could avoid feeling like brothers or brother and sister, right? Two humans, pitting their minds, hearts, and souls against the sky and against the unfolding drama of knowledge and mystery?

It would be sad when we had to part ways, and I would probably say, “But we can still be friends, right?"

rlp

Have you noticed the great evil that comes from religious exclusivity? Whenever one group of people claims that they have some kind of special arrangement with the Creator and all previous ways of relating to God are not to be tolerated, evil inevitably follows.

Zoroastrians gained power in Persia and promptly threw out the pagan religion of the Magi. Christians threw out the Pagans in Europe after stealing most of their holidays. Mayday, Christmas, Halloween, Easter – it’s all spiritual booty.

Jews have hated Arabs and denied their right to live in the traditional Biblical lands. Arabs returned their lack of hospitality with as much passion. They all give as good as they get.

Christians march into places where primitive peoples practice ancient faiths, some of them not practiced anywhere else in the world. And we tell them to forget their traditional ways and give their hearts to Jesus so they won’t burn in hell.

The Taliban persecutes infidels and destroys ancient Buddhist statues by blowing them to pieces with their tanks.

Everywhere you look, the children of God wage physical and spiritual war against each other. The blood never stops flowing, and the rest of the world looks on in amazement. When will we learn that you can’t force people to change their ways of expressing faith and devotion to the Creator?

At some point your spirit or your gut or your humanity must speak to your theology. At some point you look at your holy book, and you look at all the death and terror and ugliness that comes from fighting people with other holy books and you say, “To hell with it. I’m not doing this anymore.”

At some point you look at the sacred rituals of the people you have come to save, and you fall silent. You sit quietly and listen to their ancient songs and stories. You watch their bodies perform dances that predate Christianity and are about to pass out of existence. And you ask yourself, “How is it that I have eyes but did not see?”

At some point you look at the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount, then you look at the bodies littering the streets and the children living in squalor and you say, “Enough is enough! Burn every Koran and every Bible if we must, but the lot of them are not worth the lives of these children.”

At some point don’t you start listening to the spiritual stories of other people and find the beauty and the common ground in them? At some point don’t you realize that our myths are delicate, like environments? The oldest ones are very fragile, and many have already been lost. At some point don’t you come to understand that these things are worth saving?

HEY, RELIGIOUS GUYS!

Humanity is moving on, fellas. You can get onboard the tolerance train or you can stay behind, but this train is leaving the station. Humanity is going to a new place.

Your way has not worked, and anyone with an ounce of sanity knows that. Beat your chalices and your pulpits into ploughshares. Hell, beat your sacred books into ploughshares too, if that’s what it takes. Beat everything into plowshares, but you better get on this train.

It may take a century. It may take several centuries, but the Day of the Lord is coming. The year of Jubilee is at hand. This Ramadan will last all year, and we will party like it’s 2099. The Lord God Almighty, He who created the heavens and the earth does not need you. God can raise up children from the stones and from the dirt beneath your feet. He’s done it before. He can find a new Abraham, if that is His desire. There is always someone ready to hearken unto the voice of The Lord.

So come on guys, we’d rather take you with us. You’ve played such an important role in our history, and there is deep beauty and ancient wisdom in your traditions. We’ll listen to you. We’ll try to see the beauty that you speak of, if you’ll just quit yelling and shooting at us. Hell, we’ll even pitch in and help you rebuild the sacred monuments that hatred has torn down.

It would be sad if the children of Abraham were to miss this train and end up nothing more than a sad footnote in the story of humanity.

rlp

Is the earth ancient and are you a young child, wandering her surface and running your small hands over the bumps and buckled plates of her wisdom? Or are you the old one, tired and cynical and wise, trying to recapture your innocence by walking barefoot and kissing the feet of a newborn morning?

Is goodness somewhere deep in your heart, laid in before the ages and waiting for the year of jubilee? Or is goodness a damsel locked in a distant tower, and you the prince charming who will redeem her at any price?

Are you dragging store-bought values behind you on a little string, smiling like a rube and looking for applause from the masses? Or do you listen to the mysterious voice that lives in the low places beneath your heart? Will you proclaim those words in public, or don't you have the courage?

Can God be jerked out of the heavens and thrown to the ground? Will you leer at her there and run your clumsy hands over her body? Will you brag to your friends later that you’ve known God? Or is God the ultimate seductress, unmoved by our adolescent advances, laughing at our wanton desire and sitting, legs crossed, just outside the orbit of our highest thoughts?

And if you do meet God on the way, how will you stand?

Will you stand frightened and cowed, mired in ancient dogma that binds your feet like sheets in a dream? Or will you laugh in the face of God, smirking and superior? Will you cleave instead to the cyborg beauty, the sacred science you have set apart and called your own?

Or perhaps, having tried all of these things, you will cast off your clothing and stand naked before the horizon, watching God flutter away like a butterfly, soaring beyond all words, swooping east and west to gather all mystics and cynics into the delight of her bosom.

Who are you?

Where are you?

What are you, and what do you intend?

Tell me, for you intrigue me, and I would know you like a father or a brother or a lover or a friend.

rlp

Reaching levels of spiritual suctitude never before imagined.

A couple of months ago I got a thick publicity packet from a media company I had never heard of. Fox Faith is, in their own words, "a branded distribution label from 20th Century Fox, created to house and distribute its growing portfolio of morally-driven, family-friendly programming." The FoxFaith website further notes that only movies with overt Christian content will be considered eligible to be assimilated into their borg-like existence included in their friendly family of films.

I have fought over the Bible and minor points of Christian theology. I know what this kind of fighting is like and the passion it can create.

I went off to Baylor University in 1980 to major in religious studies. The fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention had just begun. At issue was which group of Baptists had the stronger belief in scripture. Well, that was the stated issue anyway. I was into it. Fiercely for the moderates, I argued and harangued my way through college and seminary. Sometime in the early 90s it became clear that the Fundamentalists had won, and I ran out of steam. I have wondered what outsiders thought of our fight to the death over smalls points of theology and Biblical tradition.

Now I think I know.

Christian Century has an article by Sam Robinson called, “Infallible Preachers.” In it he outlines current internal struggles and debates between various Islamic mullahs representing different factions of Islam. It’s fascinating stuff. At issue are things that sound very familiar. Preaching styles, the authority of scripture, and the roles of women in religious practice. Even the proper posture of prayer is a matter of fierce debate.

Apparently the fight isn’t just between the Arab world and the rest of us. There is plenty to fight about at home as well. It all sounds very familiar to me. And very sad.

Rlp

a Christian Magazine 
Christian Writing

rlp

A memoir of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor is a beautiful writer. She has clarity, simplicity, and depth. She is also a beautiful thinker. And that shows in her writing as well. That's why I own every book she's ever written.

My reading has suffered since I began writing seriously. I have less energy for reading, so I am careful with my choices. I’ve been avoiding church books these days in favor of serious literature that feeds the writer in me. But when I saw that Taylor’s memoir was out, I had to have it.

Behold, here is a Barbara Brown Taylor that is new to me. She is very vulnerable in this book, confessing her motives and insecurities and allowing us to walk with her as she tries to deal with them. Her struggles are the classic struggles of every pastor. She worries about her power and how she uses it;  she worries about what people think of her; and she worries about her church and its identity. Most of all, she wonders how to maintain her own growing faith in the middle of working to support the faith of others.

Some may wonder why a seasoned minister like Taylor still struggles with these things. But I am an insecure minister myself. And I know what it is like to write with some sophistication, but still worry about what people think about you. I feel a kinship with her in this regard.

Ministers can feel dehumanized at times. This happens in part because we court our righteous image and in part because the people in the pews want to see nothing but our image. Taylor describes a church party where people were pushing each other into a pool. No one would push the minister in, of course, so there she stood watching everyone else in the water. But then someone gave her a shove and she found herself in the water with all the rest of us. I found myself struggling with tears as I thought about my own life and how many times I have wished I could be “a regular person.”

Barbara Brown Taylor left church to find her faith. Not THE Church, of course, but the little church, the shaky and wobbling shadow of The Church that is every local congregation. She left the center of religion and moved to the wilderness, and there she found the presence of God had not left her after all.

I would say this to you. This is a book about leaving church. And if you never find a way to leave church, you might have a hard time finding God.

rlp

Note: Viva Books is offering this book at 30% off retail on their website. Click here for more info...