Tag Archive

[note: I wrote this last January. I would write it differently now, but I still find it thought-provoking and think it offers insight into some of the stuff I've been thinking about.]

I will tell you that I am a Christian. I am not an orthodox one. I am so far gone into what I hope to be heterodoxy (and fear, at times, to be heresy) that many would say I am not a Christian at all. But I identify myself as one because at the core of my world is Jesus of Nazareth.

I’m agnostic more often than I’m comfortable with. I might even say that I’m an agnostic Christian. I have faith in many stories and many people, but I don’t have beliefs about some propositions that are central to many people’s conception of Christianity. I have faith in the story of Jesus and faith in “God”, but I’m not sure what it means to believe that God “exists” or to believe that the supernatural is “real”. I’m not a dualist – I don’t accept the strict distinction between soul and body, between spiritual and physical. (Indeed, I argue that the fact of the Incarnation, which is the starting point of my theology, politics, etc., necessitates the rejection of ontological dualism. This is connected, at some level, to my somewhat panentheistic understanding of the Trinity. My theories about the nature of God are of course in tension with my feeling that at some level saying that God exists (or doesn’t exist) is meaningless or useless or irrelevant.) I might even be a materialist, in the ontological sense. At any rate, I’m not comfortable saying that I’m not a materialist.

Mysticism is an important component of Christian religion. Obviously a central challenge for non-dualist, materialist, (pseudo-)agnostic Christians such as I is the question of how to make sense of mysticism and make mysticism relevant in our own religious lives. What is the nature of spiritual experience, which cannot in itself be discounted even as most frameworks for interpreting it are rejected?

I propose a materialist mysticism, a mysticism of symbol and metaphor. For the non-dualist, the material is the spiritual; no distinction can be made, no separation posited. Thus, all material experiences can be understood to be spiritual ones. (This act of understanding or of seeing in a different way, with the result that we orient ourselves different toward that which is ultimate, is what we call “faith”.)  This is why, as poets have long understood, the contemplation of nature is an intensely “spiritual” experience that reveals to us whatever it is that we know as “God”. This is why living in poverty or walking down a street at night serve as vehicles for theological reflection.

Tonight I meditated in a Buddhist chaplaincy, sitting on one of a circle of pillows enclosing a group of shimmering candles. (My prayer was that a parable, or story, or metaphor about these candles might come to me.) I understood the candles to be like stars, shining in the night. I saw them as universes going in and out of existence. They were atoms, tiny particles, constituents of something grander. They were moments in time, infinite futures stretching from the present, infinite pasts converging to the now. They were both cosmos and microcosmos. I saw in them the glory of something that I have elsewhere called “God”, but any conception of God or Brahman or universe or humanity is inadequate to express fully the mystery and truth that we call by so many names.

This was of course a metaphor. Just a story, or a product of linguistic associations of meaning. It was material and physical. This means of course that it was spiritual and mystical.