Category Archives: fundamentalism

“True Believers” and Hell

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If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. (William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”) I recently offered this quote on my Facebook page and received this response from a friend of mine, “If the doors of perception were cleansed you would have something but it would not be a human being.”

When I read this response, a light bulb immediately lit up in my heart as I realized how astute this observation was. For this “Infinite” that Blake visited from time to time…perhaps too often…is a place to merely “visit” and not a place to live. But too often when people seek this “Infinite” and either arrive there, or get close enough to it to think they have, they become so intoxicated with their “success” and delighted with the “empty world of self-relatedness” (Paul Tillich) they have found that they refuse to leave. Those who refuse to leave and return to reality…this hum-drum world which is the only world we have…cease to be human and become some kind of “other-worldly” freak. One version of this…with which I am most familiar…is the typical Christian who is so “holy” that you wanta say, “Barf me with a spoon.” These are the “true believers” that Shakespeare had in mind with this description of many believers, “With devotions visage and pious action they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

 

W. H. Auden brilliantly described the misfortune of one who visits this “well of life” and refuses to leave, warning that:

 

…if he stop an instant there,

The sky grows crimson with a curse,

The flowers change colour for the worse,

He hears behind his back the wicket

Padlock itself, from the dark thicket

The chuckle with no healthy cause,

And, helpless, sees the crooked claws

Emerging into view and groping

For handholds on the low round coping,

As Horror clambers from the well:

For he has sprung the trap of hell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bigotry, Racism, & Extremism

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“True Believers” are always scary because they are idealogues, believing in ideas over reality. Sure, all humans have ideas and respect them as they allow us to communicate and to get things done in a group. But idealogues do not see ideas as merely a means to an end; they worship their ideas, seeing them as an end in themselves. Now they do have an hierarchy of values on this matter, having designated some ideas as “really important” and then assigned designations to them such as “god” or “truth” or “right” or as I like to sum it up, “truth, justice, and the American way.” These really big ideas are so important they will fight for them and in extremes they will kill for them and will often proudly announce they are willing to die for them.

Now I too believe in “god” and “truth” and “right” and value the American way of life. But since I’m not an ideologue…being in recovery from that malady…I see those words as being sounds we utter to refer to phenomena that lie beyond the grasp of words. “God”, for example, is a label we use to refer to that which is the Ungraspable, that dimension of life which we cannot wrap our head around but some of us feel very strongly is present…or Present…in this Mystery that we are encompassed by.

But my thought about God, as well as the rest of these thoughts and the whole of this blog posting, will be described as “straight from the pits of hell” by all idealogues as they cannot, or will not, handle ambiguity. They are horrified with the notion that life is dynamic, that there is a flow or fluidity to life as the notion threatens their illusion that they are in total control of their world. To understand this approach to life, to understand with the mind and with the heart, would require faith and there is no room in their heart for faith. Of course, they proudly announce that they have faith and they know that they that they do have faith because they know that they do. Our world has an object lesson in this blight on human consciousness with the Taliban, and now with Isis, and also the extreme right-wing of the American Republican party.

Yesterday Salon.com offered extensive excerpts from a recent book that addresses this issue with its analysis of racism and bigotry. The book is, “The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists“ by Stephen Eric Bronner.   The Salon.com excerpt is entitled, “This is your brain on racism: Inside the mind of modern bigotry” and here is the link:

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/27/this_is_your_brain_on_racism_inside_the_mind_of_modern_bigotry/

Here are some highlights in the Salon.com excerpt that I want to share:

The bigot has always felt queasy about transforming the visible, the ineffable into the discursive, and the unknown into the known. Observation and evidence, hypothesis and inference, confirmation and validation are thus selectively employed by him to justify what Cornel West has termed “the discursive exclusion” of those who are different and what they have to offer.

(The bigot) is always primarily concerned with proving what he thinks he already knows. He insists that the answers to the problems of life have been given and he resents everything that challenges inherited wisdom, parochial prejudices, and what he considers the natural order of things.

Other than his prejudices, he has no core beliefs. The bigot likes it when his interests are being served, when people of color are exploited, but he dislikes it when he feels disadvantaged.

Competition is good when it works for him. When it doesn’t, the bigot will insist that his competitors are cheating—and that they cheat because it is a trait of their ethnicity, nationality, or race.”

To summarize, the bigot is guilty of what Sartre called “bad faith.” “Bad faith” is a bogus faith in that it goes under the name “faith” but if subjected to scrutiny, is only egotism run amok, an ersatz spirituality which the Apostle Paul would have described as a, “work of the flesh.” But the bigot will not allow any questioning of his motives and in a sense has no capacity to do so for his heart has long sense been darkened by Darkness so that he sees only darkness and, of course, calls it Light. And, to employ the same circular reason offered earlier, it is then “Light” because he knows that it is “Light” whereas if he would allow that “Spirit of God” that he often purports to worship to visit his heart, he would see that he only at best sees faint glimmers of Light and can at best see “only through a glass darkly.” That experience would then allow him to tolerate more the possibility that people different than him have intrinsic dignity and deserve respect, that all of us have only a finite perspective.

 

To quote Goethe once again, “They call it reason, using Light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

Jesus Said, “Let Go of Your Stuff!”

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My “literary license” has here been employed but I think that “let go of your stuff” is a good paraphrasing of the teachings of Jesus.  For example, this was conveyed in his observation that it would be easier for a rich man to enter the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven.  And in another place, he responded to a query re what one must do to have eternal life with the response, “Sell all that you have and give it to the poor.”  Now, I don’t think these words were to be taken literally but were merely his ways of pointing out how deeply attached humans are to their possessions, their “stuff.”  And his teaching that we find our self only in losing our self is another example of the same them.  This detachment from the material world was, and is, a motif in Eastern spiritual teachings as eastern thought reveals less of an investment in the object world.

 

In my culture, interpreting the teachings of Jesus as “Let go of your stuff” would real ring dissonant with most people.  For, we are very attached to our “stuff” and attached to such a degree that we can’t understand the notion.  Asking anyone to see this attachment is like asking a fish to see water.  And this attachment issue also pertains to spirituality for in the West we tend to approach faith as just another item in the category of “stuff” and so we glom onto it and proceed to exploit the hell out of it just as if it were like any of the rest of the “stuff” that we are so attached to.  And, in most cases it is!  And this is actually just a form of addiction and even if the object of our addiction….the substance is something purportedly noble…it is still an “addictive substance” in our case and thus is used to avoid reality.  And this is the reason that so much of modern day religion appears to be absurd to anyone with a capacity for critical thought as they can readily see that it has nothing to do with anything other than practitioner himself.  This is what Karl Marx had in mind when he described religion as “the opiate of the masses.”

 

Shakespeare understood this sin of misplaced concreteness so well, that sin of taking for real that which is only ephemeral.  He saw that our investment in “stuff” reflected a disregard for our subjective experience…our heart…in preference for an inordinate investment in the object world.  His conclusion was “within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Here is the entire Shakespearean Sonnet:

 

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array?
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Hands of an “Angry” God

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Is it a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Well, yes, according to the author of Hebrew 10:31 who some think was the Apostle Paul. But then I, as I am wont to do, must ask the question, “What does this mean?”

With this “literary license” that I employ here…as well as in real time very often…I take the liberty to suggest this interpretation, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the ‘hands’ of Life.” By this interpretation, I suggest that it is scary to suddenly become “alive” and to realize that until that point you have been largely “dead,” living life on automatic pilot. It is even scarier to suddenly realize that you spiritual life has been part of this “automatic pilot” , robot-like life in which everyday you basically asked of life to “wind me up and watch me be Christian” or whatever your spiritual persuasion may be. When this happens one is beginning to escape the clutches of the “letter of the law” that the Apostle Paul warned against.

And yes, life is scary. It is very frightening to suddenly realize, not just as an intellectual notion, but as a feeling in the depths of the heart what it means to be human. It is horrifying to suddenly no longer be able to hide behind/beneath the superficies of our existence….ideas, intense emotions, cultural contrivances (including “stuff”) and even out faith; for, in this moment of existential crisis we often have to embrace the superficiality of faith, realizing it has been “all about me.”

But though the pain can be intense, it can be a moment of redemption in which we discover the Grace that T. S. Eliot described as “a complete condition of simplicity costing not less than everything.” And Aesychlus’s reference to the “awful Grace of God” thousands of years ago reveals an ancient understanding of the ambiguity of an experience with our Source; for, there, standing naked before God (and often humankind) we can experience and embrace the Eternal juxtaposition of judgment and grace.

With a superficial reading of these thoughts it is easy to conclude that I see God as merely a label that we can apply to the life process itself and that, therefore, I don’t really believe in a God. Well, this is a complicated matter for I do believe in God but not in the “God” that I’ve hidden behind and escaped reality with most of my life. Here I am referring to a subjective experience that is available to all and when we get there we understand—cognitively, intuitively, and emotionally–that there is a transcendent dimension to live as well as an immanent one. Yes, God is “out there” in some sense but he is also “in here” in some sense which is what Paul had in mind with his declaration, “Nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

Yes, it is complicated. But reality…that is life itself…a process so intrinsically complicated that to willfully simplify it so that it will fit into our preconceptions is very dishonest and…yes…very human. It is so much easier to avoid asking the essential questions of life that can lead is into the very depths of the human experience, that very same “condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything,” referred to earlier.

Here is a closing note from my dear friend and brother, W. H. Auden, “O blessed be bleak exposure on his sword we are pricked into coming alive.” That “sword” comes from “out there” beyond the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken)

A Dalliance with Meaninglessness

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My “church” yesterday was a discussion-group with some other retired people who are associated with the local Unitarian church. The announced topic for this occasion was, “How to find meaning in your life.”

Well, let me explain. This group was comprised of highly educated and successful men and women who were “imports” to Taos, New Mexico from various parts of the country. So it didn’t take but a few minutes for “literallew” to stir and want to announce with resolution and ardor, “Back to the bible! God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Of course I didn’t as I too do not look at life through the narrow prism of conservative thought and see…and feel…the ambiguity inherent in life. For an hour and a half we sincerely and honestly shared re our struggles for meaning through the course of our lives, struggles which continue today. Initially “literallew” did feel the leering glare of meaningless and want to revert to “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” But as the discussion deepened, my spirits actually lifted as we wrestled in the morass of meaning/meaninglessness.

On the way home I mused with my wife about why this discussion had lifted my spirits. And it was readily apparent—I felt connection! I realized…and felt…that I was in the midst of other human beings who had, and still do, wrestle with the same doubts and fears that I do. And there is a “nakedness” that is apparent in moments like this but a very appropriate “nakedness,” simple acknowledgement of human doubts and fears. And it is this “nakedness” that ultimately unites us all. Beneath the surface of our “strutting and fretting,” beneath the veneer of civilization, we are vulnerable, fragile little boys and girls who hunger to know that we are not alone.

This discussion demonstrated “faith” as I now see and feel faith to be. Now certainly many of these people would not describe themselves as persons of faith and even more so, certainly not “Christian.” Faith is the word I wish to use to describe their courage to live their life purposefully when life often appears to her without purpose.

Here is a perspective on the matter from T. S. Eliot in his Four Quartets:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

More Blasphemy!

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As I increasingly find comfort using my literary license to approach Holy Writ, I find that I’m leaving behind almost daily the carcass of sacred cows. And it dawned on me recently, as “literal lew” whispered to me again, that my view of faith appears to invalidate that of the people I grew up with. In the childish mind of “literal lew,” those people are “going to hell” while “I am saved because I believe the ‘right’ way.” For in that mind set, there is only one way to believe, one way to think, one way to feel and if you don’t comply you will immediately find yourself banished to the prison of “them,” not allowed to bask in the comfort of being one of “us.” In other words, you won’t have the comfort of belonging to the tribe.

But I don’t think that Jesus had in mind rigidly carving the world up into categories like “good”, “bad”, “us”, “them”, “saved” and “unsaved.” Jesus came to tell us that we were free and always had been as He was “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.” He was the embodiment, the “en-fleshment”, or incarnation, of a freedom that had been written into the depths of the human heart from the very beginning, a freedom that at that moment was finding an expression in terms of time and space. So, Jesus said, “You are free but freedom is very risky and takes a lot of courage. In fact, you will have to die. You will have die to your pre-conceptions about everything including your faith. But you don’t have to and I won’t make you. You are free to do as you choose. In fact, you are free to take my teachings and turn them into another version of the same bondage you are under now if you wish…possibly even under my name…but that is your choice.”

The conservative believers that gave rise to “literarylew” were and are just as saved as he is. The story of Jesus is that we are all forgiven, we are all free, but that freedom finds expression in our life only if we are willing to die, only if we are willing to allow His Spirit to loosen the grip of our ego a bit even in the area of our faith. But when the ego is threatened, it is very skilled at calling in reinforcements and fending off the assault as disillusionment is too painful. As W. H. Auden noted, “When Truth met him, and held out her hand, he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

NOTE — See I have blasphemed again! “Universalism” is verboten in the faith I was presented with as a child.

“Closed canon” equals a “closed mind/heart”

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n the “closed canon” reflects a refusal to venture beyond the confines of one rational consciousness, or even to consider the possibility that such an enterprise is possible. Emily Dickinson beautifully described this encapsulated, endungeoned mind/heart in the mid-nineteenth century with the following poem:

The Soul selects her own society,

Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

Her choice of words describing selective attention– “closing the valves of attention like stone”— is intensely vivid and cold. This is the quintessential person that Eric Hoffer had in mind when he wrote, “The True Believer.” These people live in a hermetically-sealed prison and will probably gravitate toward a social/denominational group in which people of a similar persuasion are similarly ensconced on “the heath of the agreeable, where we bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collected lie.”  (W.H. Auden) This is the “group lie” or “group think” which sometimes is described as “epistemic closure.”

This rigid certainty has infiltrated to conservative right of the American political spectrum which is replete with hyper-conservative religiosity. This close mindedness gave rise to the ludicrous phenomena in 2012 of running a presidential campaign whose slogan, upon close scrutiny, was simply, “We hate Obama.” In in the budget battle of last fall, more than one of them were quoted saying, “We are right” on the issue and in a key Republican committee meeting on the issue they concluded with prayer and a spontaneous singing of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” And it is no accident that this wing of the party is vehemently against scientists’ warning of global warming and are anti-science in general. They might well be saying, “God said,I believe it, that settles it.”

Life is uncertain. No matter how much we try to deny it, we are extremely vulnerable little critters whose biblically assured “threescore and ten” might prove considerably shorter at any moment. But it is this vulnerability that makes us alive, that reflects a “quickened” spirit, which is what Jesus had in mind with his observation that to find our life we must lose it.  As Norman Brown put it, “To be is to be vulnerable.”

 

 

 

 

Karl Jung: Our Life is a “Flimsy”

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This move to Taos, New Mexico has been every bit the adventure I had anticipated…and more. Yes, the “adventure” has been intense at times as I found that “literallew” is very much alive and kicking in the depths of my heart and does not like change. I wish that rascal would go away! (But, not really! He is a key element in my heart and always will be.)

One of the first discoveries I made out here was a Jungian study group that was being organized by a Jungian analyst who was trained at the Jungian Institute in Zurich. My wife and I joined the small group and proceeded to explore several chapters of Jung’s Tavistock Lectures. This experienced as renewed my interest in exploration of archetypal energies present in my own life and in life itself. Jung had a tremendous ability to explore the depths of the heart, having explored his own even to the point of nearly suffering a “nervous breakdown.” Jung believed that dreams were very revealing about what is going on in our life and will announce what our hidden issues are and will continue to do so until we address them. But in the current reading I have now discovered that he felt that life itself is but a dream, that even our conscious life is the playing-out of our unconscious fantasies and is itself a “fantasy” of sorts. This is what Shakespeare had in mind when he said that “our life is but the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Now of course, Jung was not nuts and realized that “reality” is just that, “real.” But he felt there was more to this “real” world than what most people realize but that most people prefer to live life on the surface, not daring to look beneath that surface and begin to explore those subterranean depths where monsters and ghouls roam about at will. But as Jung noted, “What we resist, persists” and so the hidden dimensions of our life always find expression “out there” in the world, usually in other people. My favorite example of this projection is what I call the Chicken Little phenomena, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” I grew up in a sub culture in the American South where impending doom was a basic assumption of life, where “the judgment of God” was always imminent, where “the sky is going to fall” was a constant fear. I now see that this subtle assumption of that culture…and primarily its religion…reflected a deep pessimism about life and an awareness of just how precarious our grip on life was. This belief system reflected a deep-seated existential insecurity which always requires the compensation of rigid belief systems. The more uncertain you are in the depths of your heart, the more fiercely are you certain about your belief system. And to consider that someone else’s belief system might be equally valid would threaten this certainty, requiring that other belief systems must be opposed or demonized in some fashion.

Here is the full context of the Shakespearean quote above, from “The Tempest”:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Ego-Ridden, Ersatz Spirituality

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I’ve shared here several times that Richard Rohr steal’s my thoughts. He continues to do that and is rich and famous and I am still poor and unknown. Life is just not fair! In today’s email he again chides Christians for their “dualistic” thinking and points out how the ego is hard at work in this process. It is really unnerving to realize that something as personal as one’s faith can be little more than an ego function, an escape from life, and not the expression of the Divine that one purports it to be. And that is what I’ve had to learn and am continuing to learn about my own faith. But when this truth began to sink in, the first faint glimmer of light dawned in my soul allowing me to see the darkness in which I lived. And I still live in this “darkness” and will always do so even as that “glimmer of Light” brightens each day. For, I now know…and feel…more clearly what the Apostle Paul meant when he declared that “we see through a glass ‘darkly'”.

Let me explain just one facet of the ego’s presence in the spirituality of my early life. One of the first things I learned as a child was the distinction of “saved” vs “unsaved”, a distinction which paralleled the infinite variety of other distinctions I was learning as my innocent world was being carved up into various categories. And, of course at some point I learned that I could recite the correct syllogism, the magical words, and presto I would join the club of “the saved.” This bifurcation of the world followed me through the first half of my life as I hid behind the facade of being “saved” and from that subjective prison lived and felt separate from the whole world, radically disconnected. Now, I didn’t know about this disconnection as I participated in a “saved” culture which daily reassured me that I was “one of them” because I spoke the right language and lived the right life…at least out in public! However, there was always unrest in my soul, an unrest which in the middle of my life began to grow and became a veritable tumult which is now blossoming fully in my life. But this “tumult” is merely the experience of life unfolding in my heart as it opens up and becomes, “filled with penetrable stuff” as Shakespeare once put it.

Rohr presents spirituality as a “personal” phenomena, not an ideology. Spirituality is not a mind-set or a template through which we are to view the world as “out there” and needing to be made like me. Spirituality is the process of letting boundaries down and seeing the connection between “me and thee” and between the whole of God’s creation. And the process never ends. We never “get it” as there is nothing to “get”. It is a process. “Saved” and “unsaved”???? Well, the concept does exist in Christianity and most religions have some way of setting themselves apart and reassuring its followers that they are “special.” I now feel that the only “saving” I am responsible for is the saving of my own soul…a life long process which always involves relationships with other people…and which the Apostle Paul had in mind when he instructed us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” This “fear and trembling” is the tumult I alluded to earlier.

Here is Rohr’s observations for today:
DUALISTIC THINKING

Resistance to Change
Friday, March 21, 2014

Sadly, the mind trapped inside of polarity thinking is not open to change. How else can we explain the obvious avoidance of so many of Jesus’ major teachings within the Christian churches? Jesus’ direct and clear teachings on issues such as nonviolence; a simple lifestyle; love of the poor and our enemies; forgiveness, inclusivity, and mercy; and not seeking status, power, perks, or possessions have all been overwhelmingly ignored throughout history by mainline Christian churches, even those who so proudly call themselves orthodox or biblical.

This avoidance defies explanation until we understand how dualistic thinking protects and pads the ego and its fear of change. Notice that the things we Christians have largely ignored require actual change to ourselves. The things we emphasized instead were usually intellectual beliefs or moral superiority stances that asked almost nothing of us—but compliance from others: the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the atonement theory, and beliefs about reproduction and sex. After a while, you start to recognize the underlying bias that is at work. The ego diverts your attention from anything that would ask you to change, to righteous causes that invariably ask others to change. 1 Such issues give you a sense of moral high ground without costing you anything (e.g., celibate priests who make abortion the only sin). Sounds like an ego game to me.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go. Split people split up everything and everybody else. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts.
1. Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, p. 94
2. Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
p. 151

My “Call to Preach”

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I recently started a second blog in which i am deigning to “preach”, explaining in my prefatory remarks that the notion of “preaching” brings to my mind the popular expression of the Valley Girl days, “Barf me with a spoon.” Though I have tried to avoid it, I’m sure that here from time to time as I’ve “held forth” I have ventured into a “preachy” mode in spite of myself. It is just part of who I am; and, fortunately, I approach the subject now with more humility have no pretensions to have any ultimate truth to offer, only my feeble, often self-centered, interpretation of Ultimate Truth.

In my youth, I got the “call” to preach when I was sixteen years of age. Now, of course, this was no surprise to anyone, including myself, as everyone knew that it was in my future. It was a role that had been proffered to me from early on…even from before my birth…as I learned that my mother had promised God that if only He would give her a boy, she would give him to God. Those of you who are clinically minded can immediately see the overwhelming issues that I was presented with even before I had any awareness of what was going on in this bewildering world.

This is such a complicated story but I will be brief. When I “surrendered to the call” at age 16, it really was good for me in some way as finally I had an identity. For, I was not a jock, not even close to being a “BMOC” (Big Man on Campus), and had my hands full carrying myself with the dignity that I did manage to muster forth. But, suddenly I was a “preacher” and I knew who I was. But now, looking back, I see so clearly the problem that I was dealing with on some level in my heart though not consciously at all. For, with this “surrender” I had addressed an ego need but spirituality and spiritual leadership is not about fulfilling our ego needs. I was the “Hollow Man” that T. S. Eliot wrote about though at that age only a “Hollow Boy” who would eventually grow into a “Hollow Man” and spent most of my life in that empty house.

In my early twenties, especially after a year in a hyper-conservative cemetery…I mean, seminary…I knew I had to listen to the tumult in my heart and quit this ersatz ministry. But, at that time, I had no awareness of just how ersatz the whole of my spiritual life was, only that I was very unhappy with it, and needed to escape. So, with great shame and even humiliation, I “renounced” my call to the ministry.

Forty years later, this “call” is still present as in some fashion it was my lot in life. But it no longer is the immature “call” of my youth and I’m not even for sure that “call” is the right term. That ego-laden spirituality of that era of my life is maturing and I’m so delighted that it leaves me with no need to “convert” anyone or to argue with them about spirituality. There is a Presence in this world that I like to call “God” and it/He/She is quite capable of doing any “converting” without any help of my manipulation or intimidation. God is a personal phenomena and if we do the bidding of the Apostle Paul and focus on “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” we will have our hands full and not have to project out on others our own spiritual inadequacies.