Last week, at a friend's invitation, I went to a meeting of one of the campus Christian groups. It was specifically designed for "seekers" -- those looking for spiritual answers regarding Christianity.
The meeting consisted of a blunt, aggressive preacher and a student panel. They were sandwiched between pleasant hymns.
As I sat taking notes, the speaker explained two kinds of non-Christians. First, the people disinterested in God, living empty, immoral lives. Second: religious people. He emphasized his disgust at religion and characterized such individuals as involved with the rituals of churchgoing but devoid of the fulfilling relationship with Christ.
Sitting in the classroom in the Robert Bell building, a thought came: crap. I fit into neither category. By then I'd realized that my rather uncommon position would not be addressed.
Had it been a question-and-answer talk I would have risen and said, "Well, what about the person who was a devout, zealous, evangelical Christian for five years, who grew disillusioned by the hypocrisy, who spent a year in an intense adult Bible study only to find his faith slowly shattered and who has since been on a joyous, engaging spiritual journey involving Christ's challenge to love everyone, a 'we are all one' mysticism, quantum physics, Reconstructionist Judaism, Universalism, agnosticism, mythological study, countercultural ideas, compelling experiences with the occult and chaos magick, and a general passion to explore as many beliefs, ideologies, mythologies and maps of reality as possible?"
Yeah -- it's challenging to convert one who spent years obsessing over trying to convert as many people as possible.
I took Matthew 16:24-25 seriously: "Then Jesus told his disciples, 'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.'"
But how many of the most devout pay more than lip service to the call to suffer as Christ suffered?
According to evangelical Christianity, anyone who has not "accepted Christ" is hell bound -- most of the world. The only thing that mattered was trying to save as many people as possible. That was the cross.
And nobody was doing it! In my youth group, they all believed that non-Christians went to hell, but they did little about it.
When the student panel started, the word that appeared frequently to describe a non-Christian life was empty.
But that doesn't describe me. The concept that you and I, dear reader, are really one and the same, that the divisions between people, things and energy are all temporary illusions -- that's a peaceful, fulfilling spirituality. It sure beats the anxiety, as the Prophet Bill Hicks puts it, that "eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love."
Now, paradox is great, but that's still ungraspable: a god of absolute love and absolute justice, a god who commands his people to commit genocide in Joshua 10 but then to "love your enemy" in Matthew 5:44.
Christianity often has such a deathly focus. The preacher went into gory detail about the torture of Christ, echoing "The Passion." Entry into the faith is based on what will happen after death because of Christ's death.
But I'm alive -- we're alive.
And I'd rather live a life in continual celebration of that.
Write to David at
swimminginbrokenglass@gmail.com
Visit http://www.bsu.edu/web/dmswindle
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