Spiritual But Not Religious - Bring it on!

A number of my Facebook friends have been "liking" a post by The Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniel entitled Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me. There is also a longer article posted here at The Christian Century website.

I'm actually a fan of Day1 ministries and, when I first saw the article, I didn't think too much of it. But there have been a number of "likes" and a number of comments about this article's honesty.

And I'm uncomfortable with all the positive comments and I'm trying to figure out why.

The first reason I'm uncomfortable is because of what I learned to call "parallel processing" in Clinical Pastoral Education.

The story in the longer article about the man who was born into a particular Christian denomination and felt hurt and injured by it is one that I can very much identify with.

I spent about ten years outside of the Church, as someone who was "spiritual but not religious", too afraid to seek out any Christian community lest I be told yet again that God loved me but didn't like me and that He (masculine gender with a capital H) expected my unquestioning subservience to men as a sign of my commitment to Him.

So I'm glad that, during that time, I didn't meet a clergyperson who said "Please stop boring me" in response to my spiritual struggles of that time. It was a time of genuine spiritual journeying for me. It turned out to be a period of genuine liberation back into the Christian community. And I might well have been completely done with Christianity altogether if someone had said that to me at the wrong time.

But my second niggle is this: I think a lot of the discussion I've seen is conflating "head religion" with "heart religion". (I realize these are awkward terms, but I'm using them deliberately right now in order to avoid more well-known terms over whose definitions we might be tempted to argue.)

On the level of "head religion", the Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniels makes lots of a very valid points. Theology seems to be one of the few areas where people who have never studied think that they know as much - or often think that they know more - than those who have studied. It's also ironically one of the few areas where it's actually difficult to come up with something that someone hasn't thought of already; and often that someone who thought of your brilliant insight before you did lived 1500, 2000 or 5000 years ago.

There is most certainly a type of liberal Christianity which seems uncomfortable standing inside the historic Christian tradition and which is embarrassed to own the truths, the tradition and the historic understanding of Christianity. A type of liberal Christian who tells someone "Well, your truth is as good as mine." And Daniels is correct, I think, in telling us to stop pandering to this point of view.

However, on the level of "heart religion", I believe that "spiritual but not religious" is often a genuine journey of searching for many, many people. And I'm uncomfortable with dissing that genuine search by telling someone to stop boring me.

I don't think that genuine "heart religion" - the kind of religion that ultimately locates us in a relationship with God and with other human beings - is something that we simply appropriate without some kind of struggle to make it our own. No human relationship is without its give-and-take and I don't believe a relationship with God is either.

Somewhere along the line, in order to have genuine "heart religion," we must question, listen, compromise, apologize and maybe even argue and forgive.

To the "Spiritual but not religious," I say: I'm happy to listen to you.

Don't expect me to pretend I'm not a Christian. Don't expect me to apologize for being a Christian. And, because I'm human, don't expect me to be able to tolerate forever being told how silly or stupid my faith is or how my theological education is worth nothing.

But I'm willing to listen to your story with respect if you are willing to listen to my story with respect - yes, even without trying to convert you. I trust in God that much that I don't need you to believe as I do.

Creating Godde in my own image

I’m coming out of the closet: I have decided to create God in my own image. Really, I have.

I’m going to call Her Godde. Godde is a white middle class woman. Or, in your case, Godde might be an African-Caribbean young woman, or a disabled elderly Latina.

Someone else’s God might be a 3-month old Asian boy with a congenital heart defect or even a white, middle-aged, middle-class man.

I’m absolutely, utterly serious. Here’s the deal.

Christian theology has long asserted that God has no gender and that God is neither male nor female. Yet, if we’re being honest, Western Christianity traditionally pictures God as a powerful white male who is not elderly but old enough to have power and influence and still be physically virile. The CEO of Exxon, perhaps.

Jesus, despite his ethnicity and cultural context, we have pictured as a younger version of the CEO-God. Of course, Jesus was certainly male. And we’ve also been happy to envisage him as white and powerful, a sort of up-and-coming CEO to God’s Chairman of the Board image.

So, if Jesus is divine and male then God must also be male. And Jesus called God his Father, so that must be the way that Jesus wanted all his followers forever after to refer to the first person of the Trinity, right?

Hmm.

British Methodism – I speak only for the tradition in which I was ordained rather than trying to speak for other traditions – affirms that every person is made in the image of God and that we each bear that image within us.

Bearing the Imago Dei does not mean that any one of us bears God’s complete image. Scripture tells us that God created both male and female in God’s image. Thus, woman is not a complete image of God. And man is not a complete image of God. But together we complement each other and bear something that is closer to the image of God than one gender or the other on its own.

Many conservative Christians are not only happy – but indeed eager – to point out this complementarity of gender when it suits their purposes.

So, tell me why tradition, and much of conservatism, insists that we must think of God as male and that we must conceive of the male human being as being a complete image of God and the female as representing no aspect of God whatsoever?

But here is why I am really creating Godde in my own image: because I realised that I have spent over 50 years not being able to get in touch with the Imago Dei in which I was created because “everyone knows” that God is a man.

Did I think that God is a man? No, I did not think that. Did I believe that God is a man? I didn’t believe that in my head, but I sure believed it in my heart and in my gut. God could not be part of me because God is not a woman. Even if I have “received the Holy Spirit” and the Spirit is in me, the Spirit is a man (not in Greek or Hebrew, but certainly in popular Western thought).

Of course, God is not black either. Or disabled. Or gay. Or transgendered. If you’re any of those things, you have to think that the Imago Dei inside you is a straight white male. A foreign invader. Not really part of you. You bear no image of the divinity. But if you are ready to confess to God your sin of being female, black, gay, disabled, or whatever, then God will be happy to put his “normal” corrective image within your field of vision, even though you will never be able to change the way you are.

So, I have decided to create Godde in my own image. And I hope that you too will create God/Godde in your own image in the same way. I’m not going to pretend any more that God is a powerful, white middle class male CEO. And if you don’t believe that either, maybe together we can begin to change the world one person at a time.