Roger Ray, D.Min.
We are all connected
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically
-Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist)
M. Scott Peck, the late psychiatrist and self-help author, wrote a book about creating community called A Different Drum. It is regrettably dated, having been written in the midst of the Cold War. However, his chapter on "Patterns of Transformation" is as helpful as anything in his more famous book, The Road Less Traveled. He describes the movement from childhood chaos into institutional, dogmatic religion followed by a time of questioning and doubt. The persistent and the fortunate find their way beyond that emptiness into a fourth stage of spiritual evolution, one that is a more mystical approach to faith that offers a synthesis between what can be known and the sense of awe and wonder associated with a spiritual perspective on life.
I hate to brush over this important observation but if you will allow me a very brief summation. Children are born into a frightening universe full giants and in which they have little or no control over anything that happens to them. In many instances, they resolve the fears of early childhood through incorporation into a formal, institutional religion that gives them solid answers to the big questions of life and very distinct marching orders about how to live in a way that makes you one of God's best friends and avoids any eternal conflict with the universe.
Those answers, however, don't hold much water when they are critically examined. Most people do not dismiss them outright but they move their importance way down so that they can remain tacitly Jewish or Christian or Muslim and in that way they hold onto a bit of divine fire insurance without letting institutional religion mess their lives up too much. If people took traditional Christianity literally, we would see a lot of people selling everything they own, giving the proceeds to the poor and living their lives like ascetic monks. But we, in fact, rarely see anything other than symbolic devotion to the weightier demands of traditional faith. Most people hold onto a symbolic fragment of religion, sometimes using it to excuse their own failings and sometimes using it to pass judgment on others but rarely allowing it to change their own lives.
Sadly, most institutions of religion are fairly happy with this arrangement. They are holding onto members who at least visit now and then, offer some financial support and good will that allows the institutions to continue to exist. But the more persistent critical thinkers will find the courage to swim against the current of family and society and be entirely dismissive of the truth claims associated with religion.
Most of Northern Europe and the coastal North America have arrived at this third stage. Middle America is following suit. That was certainly Scott Peck's own journey through his childhood and evolving awareness in medical school and psychiatric training. But he was one of the ones who were not willing to simply live in perpetual skeptical individualism. He pressed on to find a faith that embraced both science and a more mystical awareness of our connectedness to one another and to the universe.
I had the chance to have a brief personal conversation with Peck in the late 1980's. He advised me to get out of the ministry as soon as I could. He said, "There is no spirit left in the institutional church. You need to find a better way to help build community in the world than you can possibly do in a church." It was not the advice I was expecting from him and now, twenty-five years later, I think that I can say that he was both right and wrong.
I don't have much hope for denominational Christianity or in much of what goes on the institutional mosques, synagogues and churches of the 21st century unless they are willing to undergo radical transformation. They cannot have a future while they remain attached to ancient myths that fly in the face of modern science.
Institutions of religion tend to discourage critical thinking in favor of unquestioning loyalty. Even many churches that publicly boast of being open to those who doubt or question seem to have a fairly short period of tolerance before some level of conformity to traditional superstition and magic is expected of them.
It is horribly disappointing that so many great minds were presented, early in their lives, with a choice between reason and belief, between religious superstition and science. Richard Dawkins said that he was raised in the Anglican Church and only left when he was in his mid-teens. He realized that the theory of evolution presented a more plausible explanation for how the world came to be in its current form. He not only abandoned faith in favor of science but he has also devoted passionate energy to publishing aggressive attacks on religion, imploring other people to give up on faith entirely.
He said, "There is a new wave of reason sweeping across America, Britain, Europe, Australia, South America, the Middle East and Africa where superstition had a firm hold." I hope that he is right but I do not believe that wave of reason needs to sweep away all forms of spiritual communities. In fact, I am depending on that wave of reason to help us to become healthy again.
But Dawkins is not alone in turning his back on religion in favor of rational thought and scientific inquiry. Recognizing that the religion of our parents and the doctrinal claims of traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam simply do not stand up to the light of reason, necessarily gives us an experience of loss. It is not that traditional religion has no value. In truth, it had tremendous value to us at one point in our lives and we give it up with a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth!
Every day I talk with and receive mail from people who are both hurt and angry that they have been lied to, deceived, manipulated, and made to feel guilt, shame and fear by religious authorities, family members and friends. And yet, they still somehow want to salvage something of their faith tradition but you can hardly blame them for having trust issues.
It is entirely understandable that when you realize what a mental prison that religious superstition has been that you want to run and have nothing to do with anything that uses the language of church, synagogue, mosque or temple ever again. At the risk of sounding a bit ironic, I believe that the future of the church is absolutely dependent upon large numbers of people adamantly rejecting and vacating the institutions that have perpetuated these Bronze Age myths.
It is difficult for anyone to receive what progressive faith has to offer until they have the courage to let go of the security blanket of a familiar though out grown religion. Most of the members of the progressive congregation where I am the pastor spent several years in that "in between" region, having left traditional churches and having little reason to go in search of something that was simultaneously rational and yet open to spiritual perspectives. Only gradually have my peers allowed themselves to reconsider being a part of an organization that is defined as being a church.
For many of us, the question of "Why bother?" with any kind of church or spiritual community is a question with no clear answer. When I left denominational ministry, I vowed never to set foot in a church again and I am not entirely free of those sentiments, even as I sit here writing this book. Institutions of religion have promoted wars, violent oppression of the poor, minorities, women, homosexuals, the divorced and even those who were just free thinkers. The victims of religion number in the billions, even today, as gay people try to live straight lives to conform to the expectations of their faith community, driving many to suicide, substance abuse, infidelity and violence.
Young men and women have their critical thinking skills curtailed by religious insistence upon forcing themselves to pretend to believe what is clearly not rational. The young grow up with confused feelings of self-loathing, fear of their own bodies and neurotic guilt for having feelings and appetites that are purely human. And that is before we even get into the matters of church politics where so many of us have been tortured as employees of the church.
What brought me back to church was a need to be connected. Humans are pack animals, after all. We have an existential longing to be connected to one another, even though, after millions of years of evolution, we do not appear to be especially good at doing it.
The last few years that I was in the employ of a traditional church, I found the greatest meaning in the relief work we were doing on the Louisiana coast with Hurricane Katrina victims and among the poor of rural Nicaragua. When I left parish ministry, I found that I listened to the news with an entirely different perspective. In the days following Katrina's devastating landfall on the gulf coast, I was able to pull together a team of volunteers, raise financial support and head down to the coast to help. As an individual, learning of natural disasters produced sorrow and sympathy but left me without any reasonable means of personally responding beyond my meager individual ability to send contributions.
In community, I am able to be involved in what Bruce Cockburn called, "kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight." I am a part of a volunteer team that takes hot meals to hundreds of the unsheltered homeless of my hometown every week. On my own, my efforts would be, at best, symbolic and sporadic. In community, we encourage one another, inspire one another and plan together so that any Thursday or Friday morning of the week our church is found among the most desperately poor of our city.
The comedian, Jon Stewart, has said that "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies." I am afraid that in most cases, when we are not a part of community, our convictions largely reside in our own heads. They are not even hobbies. They are just opinions.
They may be passionately held and expressed opinions but they are much less likely to become meaningful action unless we are united with others of similar convictions. I am confident that if the congregation where I am now the pastor suddenly ceased to exist that most of the good work we do for the poor of our city would just stop happening. We remain disciplined in meaningful service only because we remain in contact with one another. Those who abandon the church may have very similar views and opinions as ours but as loners, they are of little use in actually doing anything.
Secondly, and I must ask for some grace in how I am going to say this. There are very few things that I can claim as being original to me but I have one theory of psychology that is my own. And to get the full impact of it, I need to ask for your permission to say it in a rather crass way. I call it my, "theory of asses." And it is this: Everyone will be just as much of an ass as the people around him will allow him to be. Without close community with others, we can all become pretty self-centered and self-serving jerks.
In the academic world we champion the concept of "peer review." That is, anything you discover in research or come up with in terms of your own theorizing or creation must be subjected to the critical review of the other professionals in your field. Peer review is not perfect because sometimes your peers are asses themselves. But any substantive progress in science, medicine, physics, and, I would argue, even in art and literature, are dependent upon peer review. We need each other to provoke one another to good deeds, to check one another when our egos or our ideas become irrational.
Being in a faith community keeps us in a kind of peer review. Buddhism teaches that the greatest of illusions is our sense of separation. Interesting then that scientists, specifically, physicists are starting to sound like Buddha when they speak of how connected we all are. I believe that the church has a future because it can be an expression of that great human connection and because, when we are connected we really can change the world for the better and in the process we will inevitably find that we are also being changed for the better.
And that, my friends, is not something that will happen on Twitter or Face Book. I'm staying in church because I need it and as irritating as I can be, I sense that at times you need me too. Together we will become better people while we help to give birth to a better world.
