The “spin” that I have kicked around the last few posts pertains also to religion, even mine! I was given by birth the Christian tradition, which I still greatly respect, but which I realized I was given in a socio-cultural context from my birth in the American South in the early 1950’s, coming with a particular “spin” which taught me that my hyper conservative Baptist church was very “special”; it was  so “special” that even the Southern Baptist Convention of which we were a spin-off was “too liberal.”  There was a sense in which my little denomination, the Landmark Missionary Baptist Church, took for itself the exalted position of the “bride of Christ,” an honor that awaited us when we got to heaven. These were good people, very, very,  good people, who afforded me this “spin.”  If I had not been given that “spin”, I would have been given another; we all get a “spin.”  Many of the generation I grew up in did not take it as seriously as I did and were able to slough off the spin-dimension  more readily than I was; they were secure enough to not take themselves so seriously.  I was very thin-skinned, very wounded and needed the specialness “spin” to protect me from the vulnerability that would have otherwise overwhelmed me.

My spirituality has, therefore, always been “all about me” more than I could have imagined.  This is still the case and will always be.  In a sense, “I can’t help it” for I am a mere human and can only “hold this treasure in an earthen vessel.”  My ego, still with its infantile baggage, wants to believe otherwise and have the assurance that the viewpoint I have on spiritual matters is beyond question, is “objective” in some sense.  But we are never as “objective” as we think we are and this leads to delusional thinking, especially in religion…and politics. But once you “see” a dark dimension of your heart, it is not eradicated but its power begins to diminish; that “diminishment” process follows one the rest of his life.

Beginning about a decade ago when I stumbled across the work of Richard Rohr and a meditation class at a lovely church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, this narcissism began to crumble.  St. Paul’s Episcopalian Church offered many treasures, one of which was a Sunday School class which emphasized Eastern and Western meditation wisdom and practice.  There this “monkey mind” of mine became more visible, its shrieking and chattering more apparent for what it was.  Next time, I will explore a bit more the importance of meditation in my life.