My place in the religious spectrum
(Including The marginalized, The shamanic sense, and Mysticism)
(Including Baul Christianity and Good religion)
The religion and spirituality section of my profile page began to overwhelm the rest of the document, so I have given it it's own page.
I do not wish to sound sanctimonious here, only to describe my place in the broad spectrum of faith. Indeed, it would be silly for me to try to sound sanctimonious, since I do not fit the common ideal of a religious person. However, this is an area that is central to my life and thought, so I can scarcely help giving it greater attention that I have given to other subjects of interest to me.
Throughout my adult life I have been frustrated in worship, in corporate worhip because of a severe reaction to certain body products, including some perfumes, and in private worship because of a partially disabled arm, which prohibits certain bodily expressions of worship. Alas, the posture of Cyrus E. Dallin's statue, "Appeal to the Great Spirit," is impossible for me.
I was brought up Baptist, but as an adult I have attended mainly Congregational and Episcopalian churches; also chapel services in certain Evangelical institutions. However, I have yet to find a denomination that fits my theology and spirit.
You may begin to glean some idea of my religion, if you combine classical theism and a Nicene view of God and Christ with:
Some of those with whom I feel a strong religious affinity include Augustine of Hippo, Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart, Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, J. Gresham Machen, Teilhard de Chardin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and C. S. Lewis. This is to overlook many, including some who belonged to other religions besides or in addition to Christianity, such as Black Elk, shaman of the Oglala Sioux.
My favorite books of the Bible are Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. Without them, I would have had to invent a new religion. The same is true, I suppose, if the great cosmological chapters were missing: John 1, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1-2.
I have never been comfortable with being labeled, for instance as a Neo-Evangelical or a Reformed Christian or a Christian Humanist, unless I provide the definitions; but even then, my faith is never static but in motion, which means that any definition must take that into account.
Here are my definitions of the three terms just used:
So defined, I suppose that these terms can be accepted as descriptors for facets of my faith; but it is much more. I have even drafted ideas for a new denomination, but I have yet to develop a driving passion to bring them to fruition.
By the way, when it comes to social issues, generally I find myself in the left wing of the above-mentioned traditions, rarely with the Religious Right.
A number of important aspects of my spiritual sensibilities were barely touched on in the previous section, if at all. I'll mention three here.
First, my identification with marginalized Christians. Because of my severe sensitivity to perfume, when I attend religious services, I often choose to sit in the balcony, if one is available. I did so even at the theological seminary where I used to work. One peculiarity I noticed: Speakers, even great preachers, rarely if ever took in the balcony audience. They did not make eye contact; and when they made sweeping gestures to the audience, those in the balcony were not included. We were noticed only by those seated on the platform who were looking around to see who was there. I have discovered this to be a metaphor for Christianity in general, that a large number of believers, for one reason or another, feel left out or unable to plug in; and often they are the ones who come closest to possessing the true spirit of Christ. Of Christians, it is with them that I feel the greatest affinity. This is my gesture to you. \\;;,,..* ..,,;;//
Second, my shamanic sense of being. I am nervous about mentioning it here, because it is so easy to misunderstand. I am not looking for anybody to validate it or to be drawn to it. But perhaps others will resonate with it or awaken to it in themselves. By way of letting you in, dear reader, allow me to quote from a letter I wrote to a Benedictine monk and priest, who is one of my good personal friends:
Your letter seems to have evoked a sense of commonality at a deep level of personal identity. I rarely have the privilege of expressing this sense of identity, for it fits no category that is native to our culture and so sounds more like fantasy than reality, more like weirdness than rootedness.
I use the term "shamanic" for it; but that is misleading in that it conjures up images of peyote, vision quests, medicinal potions, and a tribal role. I mean none of that. Nor do I mean chosenness in some ego-centric sense.
It is rather a usually subtle, sometimes powerful sense of cosmological connectedness and of being ordained in some innate, natural way, though not by any formal rite, to be a bearer of sacredness. It becomes distinctive only as I realize that few others share this sense.
The shamanic feeling reaches back into my youth, for I recall thinking then that, of characters in the Bible, I was perhaps most like Melchizedek, the only personage in there one might readily associate with a shaman. But those were days when fantasy played an important, perhaps necessary, role in my life. Now the fantasy has mostly left me, but the shamanic sense remains.
You have been ordained by formal rite, but do I also recognize in you an innate ordination, a special connection to nature and to the sacredness immanent in the cosmos that will not be restrained by walls and that must both invade and flow out of your soul, even if it flows back only to nature itself? Do I recognize in you the consciousness of nature itself, in all its dialectical involution?
You certainly have much more claim to traditional shamanism than I. Mine has existed in an uneasy isolation that is enforced by an incognizant culture. It is purely, how shall I describe it, mystical, although that word has countless senses. You have, I think, a much more tangible experience of it.
I have found my gifts of empathy and abundant love connected to this sensibility and thereby discovered a limited ability to heal. I do not mean in any magical or miraculous sense, or even in a medical sense. I am speaking of healing of the soul, be it only to a small degree; and of wounds that are most typically caused either by religion or by the failure to be loved. But the way, whether intellectual or intimate, is hard.
Third, mysticism. I won't go far into this here. I will merely indicate a few things it is not and mention a handful of features.
It is not:
Among its features:
If you have read this far, then you now know more about my soul than many a close personal friend has known. Please be wise and kind with this knowledge.
Two more aspects of my spiritual profile come to mind: my insistence upon good religion and what I sometimes call Baul Christianity. The latter first.
Having been chemically shut out of organized religion, I've become highly conscious of the international phenomenon often discussed under the rubric of "unchurched Christians," "unorganized Christianity," "believing without belonging." Not only are these terms negatively cast, but they are often used pejoratively. A term is needed that is affirmative without being pejorative, so sometimes I speak of "Baul Christianity" or "Baul-like Christianity." That would be from the Bauls of Bengal, who affirmatively reject religious organization and yet have a rich creative and spiritual life drawn from a mix of Hinduism and Sufism. Baul Christianity would be Christianity that affirms a rich spiritual life, that is a force for goodness in the world without the trappings or structure of organized religion, and that is theologically reflective on its own dispersed character without a sense of inferiority to organized religion. However, I suppose that the term has too close an association with a non-Christian religion for many of the Christians I'm talking about to be comfortable with it; and, in any case, Baulism is too imperfect an analogy. Nevertheless, the general point stands.
As for good religion, I hold that religions, to be good, must meet certain meta-religious criteria, that is, principles that stand whether they are principles native to the religion or not. I am hardly the first to make such a suggestion. For instance, the postulation of some such set of principles is implied when Averroes (1126-1198), an Islamic philosopher, remarked that a philosopher "should choose the best religion of his period."*
To give some examples of criteria: A good religion:
This is as if to approach a religion from the outside, which for many of us entails a certain flight of imagination. However, one might approach the matter from within, for instance, by saying, "The worthy essence of any given religion (including my own) is what is good and beautiful and true about it, nothing more or less."
Admittedly, such approaches lay a philosophical groundwork for so-called cafeteria Catholicism and smorgasbord Protestantism -- in fact, even for a Promethean rebellion against "the gods" -- a groundwork which can generate tension with the principle of "teaching the whole counsel of God" and which can initially create havoc with the so-called "anologia fidei," the coherence of doctrine. I ask, what could be more beneficial for theology than such tension and such havoc?
I once elicited much expression of longing when I described to a discussion group the sort of religion that many seem to be looking for. Such a religion would be one that:
The general feeling of the group was that no such religion exists, at least, no such organized religion. I ask, why not make our religions so from within or else use our religious freedom to create one or more such religions?
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* Averroes, Tahafut al-Tahafut = Inconsistency of the Inconsistency, as quoted in: Islamic Philosophy and Theology: An Extended Survey, [by] W. Montgomery Watt (2nd ed. Edinburgh: University Press, 1985): p. 118. |
Posted as part of the "Profile" page, April 15, 1999; new url, January 27, 2004; separated out, August 5, 2005; last modified, August 5, 2005
Copyright ©1999-2005 by Norman E. Anderson