(Dis)Owning God
For centuries, believers have fought what seems like an interminable tide of secularism. The very foundation of faith has seemed at risk in a world of flattening matter, in which religion is reduced to an opiate for coping with stress. Pick your poison.
This faithlessness has infected even the hearts of many believers themselves, so that even though we go through the motions of declaring our creed, saying the words, we don't seriously experience a world suffused with Spirit. We are this or that denomination, and it is a matter of fellow-feeling or intellectual exercise which label we apply, which doctrine we evangelize or catechize on the weekend.
We're talking to you, liberal Christians. We're suggesting that perhaps the crazed charismatics and unfashionable spiritual warriors in your pews may be more in tune with the future-present than those that mainline palatable palliatives.
Perhaps everything is a lot more uncomfortable than sermons on Sunday (or whenever).
And maybe we need to ask dangerous, damning questions about who's on whose side. And uncover fresh faith far from where we normally look.
So we say: struggles between rationalist secularism and faith as such are becoming passe. Indeed, the struggles to come will be about which God we actually worship -- and we may be surprised where the faultlines lie.
The world-becoming is not secular vs. religious; it is filled with spirits all the way down. The question is not whether we believe in God; it is which practicing powers and principalities we feed with our spirits and participate in with our souls.
From this perspective, perhaps it is wise to be humble. Revelation warns us over and over that apostasy comes in good-looking raiment. Who are truly living the body of Christ, prefiguring the presence of holiness in all our relations? Perhaps labels are less instructive than we thought; perhaps it's time to look deeper down.
One God to Rule them All
Firstly, an affirmation.
There is just one God. This is the deep truth of monotheism, the mystery that holy women and men have sanctified with their radiant "Yes!" There is just one God, there is just one, just one that is not any specific thing, infinite and empty, the ground and the completion of being, the fount of creation upon which all things depend. Belief, participation in the fullness of this being, all being, Great Spirit, this is the perennial philosophy, this is the shared core of and beyond religious trappings. Yes!
At the same time, the ancient churches recognized that the world was filled with many kinds of spirit, with many spirits. Whether we call them angels and demons, gods and goddesses, fairies and little people, or by any of a hundred other names: believers in most eras knew the world to be filled with them.
After a long disenchanting detour, science may now be returning us to this wider world, again. If we understand complex systems to be coherent and self-regulating, perhaps personified spirits are the most meaningful way for us to relate. Perhaps the patterns of emergence among wholes and entanglement among pieces far apart, perhaps these allow a variety of ways of being in touch with beings. Like prayer, and worship. And less conscious means, like what we do when we're not in church.
There is just one God, at the deepest heart of things; in comparison all else is just Creation.
But all the actually-existing monotheisms, as politico-religious hierarchies, as institutions, tended eventually to take this living ineffable awakening and wield it in service to the gods of a specific ethnicity, polity, empire. Legitimizing the universalization (by sword-point) of a particularity.
For a "good cause", maybe: in exchange for the conversion of the emperor, say. Yet this stamped the honored seal of the name of Jesus on bloody murder, on war and pillage, and worse: genocide. Christianity in this apostate mode aids empire by washing away the differences among peoples -- not against oppression, but in its service -- making it easier to fuse more nations together in a post-ethnic whole, a "multi-culturalism" that, like ours today, is a mask for assimilation.
Today, think of missions. Pretending to point to the deepest oneness of everything, beyond any petty distinctions, pretending to speak on behalf of the Christ that scandalized the righteous authorities of the "right" ethnicity by serving those of another, do not missionaries actually encourage people the world over to change dress, change language, change songs and ceremonies and stories, in exchange for the promise of a world hereafter and access to the empire here and now?
In whose service, this mission?
Long ago, Christianity was the slave religion, a feast of agape in which Jews could be Jews and Greeks could be Greeks, yet supping together in participation with the holy body of a living-beyond-death human spirit that had become one with the One Being of all.
Yet within centuries it had merged with the executioners and emperors, the hierarchy that maintained Rome's spiritual capacity to assimilate barbarians, even as warlords duked it out and princes begat kings.
What happened?
Again, rebels and reformers eventually outflanked the Inquisition, inspired peasants against lords, cast asunder reconciliation with Mammon. Yet within just generations their insurrectionary return to direct participation with the spirit of love became justification for thirty years' horror and blood. Persecuted pilgrims became persecuting property-owners. Great Awakening became Make America Great. Again.
What is going on? "By their fruits ye shall know them." Who are Christians in service to? Which gods, which angels and/or demons, which spirits?
For one thing is clear: the god(s) of Christendom are not (or not only) the spirit of all things, the truly universal. Christians taste the sweet spirit of the love that passeth all understanding, it inspires us and renews our faith, but cynically or without meaning to -- at least in part, at least at times -- the institutions of Christian religion have over and over entered the service of other spirits.
Who are they?
Powers and Principalities
Learning to look again for the spirits we've been blind to, we can see the powers-that-be. Not groups of men in smoke-filled rooms -- for though they surely concoct their conspiracies, they are evermore blindly in service of greater forces in the complexity of the world. Not humans. Powers. And principalities.
What can this mean?
Walter Wink has reminded Christians for decades now that newfangled political theories are echoing older, perhaps forgotten wisdoms. Spirits aren't only "out there", external to society; and the body of Christ isn't the only being living through humans-as-parts. In other words, social systems when they reach a certain size, certain complexity of self-reproduction, can become demonic forces (or, more rarely, revolutionary angels) in their own right.
This is not an abstraction. Systems of oppression, cycles of trauma and abuse, these are stubborn structures that reproduce themselves, their woundings and pain, through our bodies and our lives. Even as we become conscious of them, even as we try to change them in ourselves and those around us, they persist, becoming more subtle, mobilizing new technologies in unforeseen ways, unintended consequences.
Look around. We "know" more than ever, and yet with the best of intentions -- what are we doing?
Now look around inside your congregation. Do these powers and principalities have no foothold among your brethren? Surely they do. There are multiple spirits at work, and sometimes the vestments and liturgies are masks for sordid and horrible things.
But we should not consider only the "bad apples", the sexual abusers and the racist haters. The road to hell is paved, they say, with good intentions. Good people, well-meaning people, can without meaning to participate in the destruction of the world. They can reinforce capitalism while memorizing memory verses, say. "It is easier for a wealthy man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel..." doesn't say anything about BMWs.
Our churches and our prayer meetings are battlegrounds, underneath the decorum or the squabbles. Even within our selves, we can feel the tug and pull towards participation in different great patterns of reproduction. Different powers. Different gods.
How can we tell whom we are helping, who is working through us and those around us? It's not enough to look at the words, at whether we say the right things, speak the right names. After all, wolves enter in sheep's clothing. We have to look at the whole of our lives; what are we tending to? What spirits are we functionally participating in? We have to listen to our hearts, pray, and open our eyes to the much-greater patterns of powers beyond us.
By their fruits shall ye know them.
Mystics and Mothers
But if demons inhabit the churches (and mosques, synagogues, temples) -- then maybe angels live outside of them too. Maybe we have unexpected allies.
The first place to look, a familiar place to look, is among the mystics.
For Christian mystics, God, unconditioned and beyond all human knowing, reaches to the willing soul and enfolds it in grace, in the name of Jesus. For Buddhists, the buddha-nature, unconditioned and beyond all human knowing, enters the willing soul and enfolds it in enlightenment, in the name of Avalokitesvara or another bodhisattva. For Sufis, for Kabbalists, for Taoists, for some among a thousand traditions, remarkably similar practices and reports of ecstatic communion infuse divergent religious languages and ceremonial rites with a common awareness that humans, by works and by grace, can at times and for a time sync up with the cosmos.
This helps us come into clarity about the truth of monotheism, and one key source of why people are moved by it.
And helps us remember that any conditioning of the highest God -- any specifics of place, culture, language or ceremony -- must necessarily fall short. As our potential Zen allies might say, we must not let the finger distract us from the moon.
But then -- what of Jesus? What of the uniqueness of this story -- the good news we bring to the world?
The mysteries of homoousios have been debated for ages -- and frankly, a lot of people have been killed over differences that were more politically inspired than inspired by presence with God.
And yet -- the trinity can perhaps be understood in the context of the mystic nondual:
- God the Father is the unconditioned, that about which nothing can be said, the eternal and empty of form.
- the Holy Spirit is the ten thousand things, the dance of spirit suffused through endless variations of Creation.
- and Jesus, God the Son, is a human completely participating in being with these emanations of the cosmos.
Jesus was a human. Jesus is a god. Jesus is GOD.
He had a mother, who birthed him, breastfed him, and bore him off the cross.
He rose from death, appeared to his disciples, and transitioned into a spiritual body that lives inside the faithful.
Everything is part of the cosmos; and yet Jesus is part of the cosmos in a fully realized way. By participating in the god of the body of Christ, we can share in the full realization; we become children of God as well.
But these are just ideas. Jesus had a mother. Jesus was a living human, and participated in Godhood, in presence with the deepest mystery of the world in a way that has inspired through the generations. Afterwards, people came up with many words, many doctrines; but Jesus was once a man. Jesus had a mother!
Jesus had a mother, and was killed for the threat his popular appeal posed to the government. He had a mother, and she watched them break his legs on the cross. "Father, why have you forsaken me?" He had a mother, and she wept for him, and tended his body. He had a mother, and when the angel-spirits spoke to her of why the crypt was empty, she called out the good news.
Layers upon layers of familiar exegeses have stultified the shock: but this good news is that of a mother, who birthed a boy, crying out his transfiguration, his participation in the All, in God.
Jesus. A mother. God.
Mystery!
Beyond the doors of our comfortable churches, our familiar ecumenical haunts: Buddhists, Sufis, Kabbalists, Taoists, and ten thousand other pathways to the sublime.
What would Jesus really do?
Mary of the Witches
Yet the world is not only One, it is also many. A cacophany of modes of existence, of spirits, a wildness of life.
The domination culture of the false Christ, the empire that was Rome, has eaten so much of the world. One of its profoundest deceptions is to treat the vastness of God's creation -- in which God is immanent -- as slave-matter to be conquered and exploited.
To make wildness into sin.
For many long European centuries, the bishops and the princes ruled the cities and castles, but the villagers of the earth -- the "pagans" -- lived with the spirits of the forests and streams, the goddesses and gods they'd tended and been tended by for generations.
But as part of the burgeoning expansion inherent in the seeding of capitalism -- and as part of the Empire-spirits of the Church -- the Inquisition and the state went on a long campaign to repress the remaining traces of place-based spiritualities. The Malleus Maleficarum was a field guild that hyped the traditional fear of malevolent powerworkers into a full-blown, well, witch hunt.
This is one of the faces of fear.
On the other hand, many (Catholic) communities found ways to bring Jesus, Mary, the saints, and traditional spirits into an accord. Syncretism gives us Irish Brigid, Haitian Vodoun, Cuban Santería, the Native American Church, and many others.
There are reasons why pagan people, animists and the indigenous, at times have chosen the promise of Christ's power to expel demons, over the sorcerors' power to tame them. In all kinds of ethnicities and religious communities, there have been people that are corrupted by their powers; seduced by greed; that use potency and prestige for personal benefit, for the harm of others. And practitioners have at time chosen complicity with the Powers rather than resistance.
But more often than not, these have been resistance spiritualities. And spiritualities far more in communion with the land, than cahoots with the Empire.
If you had to choose, how would you choose?
These days, people all around the world are choosing to speak to the goddesses of the land, again. Native people cultivating a return of traditions they remember, recreated from ancestors and beholden to descendants. And neopagans whose link to ancestral ways is as thin as the wind, but who listen to it as closely as they can; and the waterfalls, the leaves, the growing roots of trees.
Mary Magdalene was a whore, perhaps; certainly a woman of lowly status and earthy associations, considered impure by the patriarchy. Despite the horror of the proper authorities, and their ideas of what "Father God" was and wasn't, Jesus welcomed Mary as she was, and she became one of his closest allies.
Maybe you don't have to choose between Heaven and Earth.
Maybe Jesus was giving us a parable, a reminder that the Holy One Beyond All is also manifest in the earthly, specific, local. The dance of the lowly woman anointing the body of the anointed one. Serving the Samaritan woman water at the (holy) well. The stones of the earth cry out, if we listen.
Heaven and Earth. There is One beyond all, but there are many forms of belief, many faiths participating in many orders and kinds of deity, within Creation. The words we use, the names we give are often misleading. Within the monotheisms, especially, there are so many different spirits materially mobilized behind the false unity of a single Name.
Among Christians, we're talking not just of the disguised ancestor-worship of saints, nor only the goddesses called Mary; not solely the triune singularity, the panpsychic Holy Spirit, Father-king and dharma-Son. No; there are even many Christs among the Christians. There is the Jesus that inhabits the living body of Christ, the spirit invoked and maintained by the rituals. And the Jesus that justifies and rubberstamps the consumption-bloat of the elites. The Jesus that comes into hearts and infuses them with love. The Jesus that overturns the tables of the moneychangers and haciendas. And the Jesus of Constantine, Cortes, and Pizarro.
Many Jesus's, or many using his name.
Seeing legions within us, perhaps the legions without are resolved more clearly; perhaps we recognize that casting out the demons may cast out much of Christendom; coming out of Babylon may return us to a world praying with the trees, with the wells, with the spirits of life.
What then is the good news, among the witches and the pagans, the animists and indigenous, the earth peoples?
Perhaps Jesus embodies the Way, that communion and connection can emerge without domination, that alliances with earth spirits can give us not personal power but collective potentia, that differences can be met not with assimilation nor coercion, but gifts and blessings.
Perhaps Jesus is how not to become an Empire. Perhaps the best lessons for how to do what Jesus would, come not from Empires but from those they tried to crush. Those that remember how to listen to the earth, the sky, the birds and animals, the trees and flowers, to all of life. Not to conquer, but to cooperate.
Look amid the institutions of Christianity, the many churches, the many churched. Look among the people seeking for the power of love's healing touch, in daily life. Look among the peoples singing songs of remembering right relations.
See the spirits, the many spirits, that move through Heaven as they do through Earth. See the ineffable One beyond all.
In a time of ecological disconnection on an existential level, who are our allies?
Come out of Empire, my people!
A war among spirits is being fought, and knowingly or ignorant we are the battlefield. There may be different ways to talk about it -- but the call is clear.
This is not a time to be deluded by the superficialities.
Names are misleading.
"What is to be done"? Rather: in whom do you believe?
Who is your God? Who is your people?
Whose side are you on?