Variations of ‘Christian’ Thought with Variations of my Own
These day some are thinking morality can be legislated, that Christianity can be ‘crammed down the throats of others’. That isn’t new, check history.
Even my own thinking, if you’ve read my writings much at all, you might think “he’s always into God talk or spirituality”. You would be partially correct. I don’t believe there is a secular/sacred distinction—it is all sacred to me. Its just the way I see it—or better said, have experienced it. It doesn’t mean though I don’t believe in the separation of church and state. I am ‘complicated’. Crawl inside my head for a day.
Spirituality is available to anyone, anywhere. Available to those within (or without) any of the world religions and the 30,000 variations of Christianity—the protestant denominations—along with the Catholics, the largest Christian group often seen as going to hell by many of those protestants. Martin Luther began the protest in 1517 with the 95 Theses he nailed to the door in Wittenberg. Protestants have never stopped protesting. This spirituality is available to the non-religious too. It’s a no-charge, free offer to all.
If you are one who has bought into Christianity yourself along the way you may be shaking your head. Over it’s 2000 years of existence multiple variations have surfaced, sunk, and re-surfaced.
The introductory—Christianity 101—path I personally was on—where my parents took me as a toddler—was Nazarene. Back then it was often labeled ‘holy rollers’. Nazarenes were against lots of stuff—I’d concluded that if anything in life offered you an ounce of pleasure, it was sin. But even with all the negativity one thing they were for with gusto was the third branch of Christian government—of the Trinity—referred to as the Spirit. Nazarenes left salvation to the Baptists and clamped onto what was called entire sanctification—or perfection in this life. Ultimately what amounted to sinlessness as it was preached back then. By junior high after adolescent hormones kicked in, it was glaringly obvious to me that ENTIRE sanctification was a fantasy—the impossible dream as Don Quixote sang in Man from Lamancha.
But the Nazarenes did lay the foundation for what evolved into a real relationship with the creator—or whatever you personally chose to call ‘it’. As one said, salvation is like the vestibule of a church, it’s a good place to enter but a poor place to stay. There is a sanctuary just beyond. Risking sounding ‘judgmental’, most believers have remained in the foyer. So the question becomes how does one get to the sanctuary—a fuller experience with this divine being—this Force.
Many groups have come up with ‘How to’ plans which depend on what YOU do, steps YOU take—yet none work. Ironically the Great Spirit is seeking each and every human being. There is a God piece ‘installed at the factory’ within everyone—whether red or yellow, black or white as we sang in Sunday school. How that God-piece gets activated is the big question. Some of us came to see we could not make the connection on our own from our side. We have no power to do so. The power is from the other side. What is our part then? We ‘simply’ quit running and turn around to the embrace—yet it is far from simple. Richard Rohr and others believes only experiencing great love or great suffering gets anyone beyond the foyer.
The circumstance surrounding this deeper experience often are finding one’s self at the end of your rope—with no knot; having run out of solutions, or being in the pits of despair and doubt ready to toss in the towel. Even then it is not one size fits all. Thinking it will happen the same for me as it did for ‘him’ or ‘her’ is a dead end.
Through the ages there have been men and women like more recently (last 250 years) John Wesley who was ‘strangely warmed’ or J. O. McClurkan, a Cumberland Presbyterian here in Nashville who had a similar experience to Wesley. McClurkan’s experience resulted in Nashville being the East coast location of the beginnings of the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene. (The other location was Los Angeles). J O went to his Presbyterian brothers describing his experience. They sent him packing likely hearing what he had to say as criticism. Bill W, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous also had a similar experience. Wesley, McClurkan and Bill W, like scores of others, experienced something beyond salvation. It to them was richer, deeper than before—something Jesus himself tried to explain to his ragtag twelve. After His resurrection he said he had to go—that something, someone even better was coming. The First Americans called it The Great Spirit—one who leads us deeper into more profound truth via this ineffable connection with what is unseen.
You can’t contrive this shift to the deep—even though many have tried. With what still is called holy rollers, the drama is often over the top.
Annie Dillard says we simply must put ourselves into the flow of grace, the flow of the Spirit—and hope. Old holiness language was to put yourself ‘under the spout where the Glory comes out’. So I can read, study and attend services immersing myself in church life yet that too often becomes an end within itself—Churchianity.
When you are done, I mean really done, ‘stick a fork in me DONE’— when you are ready to tell all of it to just go to hell—at that juncture I suggest you baton down the hatches because you are ripe for a God move. If you’ve not learned yet, God is a good size fellow (sticking with the paternalistic metaphor) with broad shoulders more than capable of anything you want to dish out. You will find, maybe for the very first time, His character is not as you’d thought. He is about love, not hate or indifference to you and your little life. That often takes a good while to sink in depending on how he decides to approach you in particular. Like I said, one size does not fit all.
What I am talking about though is pretty unreal. It is mystical, a term which comes from the root mystery. Very often what you thought you’d totally figured out gets blown to pieces. There is a vastness you are being introduced into beyond intellectual understanding. That scares many and they go no further sometimes leaving faith entirely. But some of us, still with intrepedation, go on to explore what the heck is happening. Those that press on find what was like a black and white movie turns into Technicolor. What was one dimensional is multi-dimensional—NOT just three, but multi-dimensional. (Speaking of movies, being a sci-fi movie person actually may give you a leg up in taking this profound shift into your own understanding of ultimate reality, watch Dr Strange with Benedict Cumberbatch).
Take this to the bank: THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE. In what the old Nazarenes called sanctification, we are changed, being lead little by little, year by year into a new sense of Being—beyond the lives we once lived. Do I sound crazy? Want to lock me up? Oh ‘they’ (even the church) have done so with many before me for much less. What you need to know though along this way, the doors lock behind you. You cannot go back. You have seen too much—yet you will ultimately find you have no desire to go back.
It is no fun being persecuted and isolated. The journey does at times get lonelier. It’s the very reason for the scripture that the way is narrow and there will be few—not because the door is locked. The welcome mat has been and is always out.
So even with all the misleading teaching, I am grateful for my upbringing as a Nazarene and the grounding regarding the Holy Spirit. I left them as a high school junior for the Methodists in Tulsa and have returned to the Methodists—having tried Four Square for a short while, the Presbyterians for a few years, having a masters from a Southern Baptist seminary and now in the last couple of decades heavily influenced by edgy Catholics like Henry Nouwen, Richard Rohr and others. My Catholic buddy Dale says “O’Molloy, you are Catholic, just not confirmed!” O’Molloy was actually the origin of my name and it’s very likely they were Catholic back in Ireland. So to Dale I say, whatever. God has said he really doesn’t have a care about any of those labels. My life has taught me to not fear drinking from different wells on this Way.
In the chaotic world we are in, with the hardship and suffering I fear many come, the stage is being set for transformation. Remember Richard says, “Only great love and/or great suffering ever changes us”. I long for you to know for yourself this ‘warmth’, this sense of Being. I hope it is great love first that takes you deeper, coming to know down to the marrow within your bones, that this loving creator is real—and after YOU.
“Only people who have first lived and loved, suffered and failed, and lived and loved again, are in a position to read the Scriptures in a humble, needy, inclusive and finally fruitful way. If you put the Scriptures in the hands of a person uninitiated by life, they will always make it into a head trip. It becomes a set of prescriptions instead of an actual description of what is real and with is unreal.”
from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, Richard Rohr, pg 128.