And So the Stories Emerge ...

In an earlier post, "Spiritual But Not Religious," I explored the idea that religion is the story we create to communicate about the spiritual happenings in our personal lives.

As I defined it previously, spirituality is an awareness of  the "Beyond" in our personal lives.  Since that awareness can involve every sensory capacity of my being, it can not be reduced to just intellectual or emotional components.  It is impossible to completely express it to someone else.

The best we can do is to create a story ... a mythology.  For that we need metaphor and simile.  We need poetry, art, music, drama and such.  They become our best tools for communicating about breakthrough happenings in our personal lives.  Yet we must wait for our listener to respond, saying:  "Yeh, I had something like that happen to me!"  Only someone who has had a similar experience can sense the depth of what we are saying. 

While the "happenings" of life are final and complete,  our stories are not. They need constant updating,  recreated from our current, best understandings and delivered via best our means of expression. But these attempts at communication are temporal,  not eternal.  Game-changing experiences and new understandings keep breaking through, demanding attention.

This blog is about “game changing” events that are occurring in present time.  Contributors to this blog intend to explore events that demand a new story.  This post is about one that is unfolding right now.

Consider the following:

In the last fifty years, cosmology (the study of the universe in its totality) has made enormous progress in tracing the history of this universe back to its origin in a cosmic flaring of heat and light.  That occurred some 13.7 billion years ago.  Today’s cosmologists can determine with reasonable accuracy the state of this universe back to one nano-second after its birth!

The story emerging from this new information is that a previously non-existent mystery flared itself into existence as what at that moment became our time and space. 

The mystery had been “no thing.”   It was “no one.”   Yet, paradoxically, it was everything and everywhere.  As the voice from the burning bush is reported to have said to Moses:   "I am who I am",  or equally translated,  "I will be who I will be." 

It (and we cannot really call it an “it,” since it did not exist as a "thing") ... It chose (and again the human word "chose" is not appropriate but there is no other word) ... It chose to experience itself as a physical reality.  It flared forth out of its "no-thing-ness" and its "no-one-ness" to become photons of light blazing forth as a cauldron of heat.

Extreme heat over a span of 400,000 years of Earth time gave birth to helium and hydrogen atoms.  Every atom, every element that exists today, was forged out of that those initial photons of light.  Every aspect of every element that forms our current universe came out of that same Mystery.    Everything that today IS is connected, united, and whole in this common birth.

Some folk might choose to label the mystery that poured itself out in the Big Bang as “God."  If we join that human community then we need to remember that the word "God" is part of a human-created story designed to give temporal meaning to our daily experience it is reasonable to say that everything in the universe is made of “God-stuff.”  We are all -- everything is -- “God-stuff.”

The image of a supernatural being shaping clay that is separate and different from itself was a good one, once upon a time, but not the best in this current cosmological reality.  Perhaps “incarnation” can describe what happened 13.7 billion years ago when the Holy Mystery unfolded into the universe’s form.  Creator and creation are one and the same essence, different only in form.  The "flaring forth" was the first incarnation,  the first entry of a pre-existent beingness into time and space.   Perhaps it would be best to describe Jesus not as the first incarnation, but as one of the early human who had sensed who he really was ... and who we really are.

Because of the influx in those beginning seconds, it may be time to acknowledge that “I am God experiencing what it is to be human.”  “I am kin to every other creature, every tree, every mountain, planet, star and galaxy that now is.”  And, as this floods our consciousness, we become aware that we have work to do as co-creators of whatever is next to be.  For that we need the state of awareness of which a Hindu sage once spoke, saying that the goal of life is to realize “Tat twam asi.” (I am that too.)

All of that has ramifications for the old story’s concepts of the supernatural, the need for sacrificial atonement, and the nature of that mysterious Source.

Who can take us toward this new story?

Try Thomas Berry’s work.  He sees it in all nature.


Brian Swimme: He sees it in the cosmic dimensions of the universe.

Rupert Sheldrake: He sees it in formative fields of force that hold new forms together.

And many, many others too numerous to mention who have ventured outside the boxes of our past to pursue the Numinous wherever it is at work today.

They are reforming the story (religion), so that it may more accurately reflect the reality (Life), about which the story seeks to speak.

--
Bob Ouradnik
Greensboro, NC (June 2011)

Spiritual But Not Religious

The phrase “spiritual but not religious” has a two-faced usage.  Most frequently I hear it being used as a way to escape the embarrassment of not being able to identify a church community to which one belongs,  or a creedal statement that one avows,  or to avoid admitting that one just prefers to sleep in on Sunday morning.

But there are a few who use the cliché as an honest description of a deep yearning inside their being -- a longing for a sense of connectedness, of unity, of wholeness with a Mysterious Holiness that is experientially knowable but defies reduction to a verbal description.  Perhaps these lucky few recognize they have experienced that union in some deeply satisfying moment of their lives and want that experience to repeat itself again and again.

For me, spirituality is best described as “as awareness of the Beyond that is in the midst of everything.”  Another word for that Mysterious Holiness could be “Moreness,” as Marcus Borg suggests, or perhaps it would be best to return to the early Hebrew, refusing to pronounce or spell the holy name at all.

In any event, this numinous reality is beyond all human intellectual, artistic or other form of expression.  Yet, it is knowable as an intensely personal and wholistic happening in any individual life. It may occur anywhere or at anytime.  It may break through into consciousness whether we are in Notre Dame Cathedral or while in some lowly, secular pancake house - as I once experienced.

Life constantly manifests the opportunity to experience this reality -- for IT is the source and the content of all life. The Beyond is in the midst of everything.  Spirituality is the process of becoming aware of it.  That moment is  a transforming one.

When such a transforming event occurs it is our nature as human beings to feel driven to share it with someone else.  (Try to stop a teenager’s from sharing his ecstasy over a new-found love.)

In order to share with another, a story is needed.  Religion is the story we tell about our spiritual happenings.

Note carefully:  In contrast to spirituality which manifests as an awareness of the depths of life,  religion is a human production.  Religion is something we make up to try and explain life.  It uses human words, human images, and human symbols -- all reductionistic and never capable of permanently describing the wholistic spiritual happening completely.  But, being a human production religion is constantly open to being updated and changed as our understandings of life and our powers of expression grow.

Let's not denigrate Paul the Apostle for using the Ptolemaic seven story universe to locate heaven or Luke's use of image of a virgin birth to describe the incarnation of divine energy.  Both were the most meaningful metaphors available in their time for a mystery.  Their metaphors for communicating that reality may seem severely inadequate to modern men and women who understand new sciences like cosmology and psychology.  

We do not share the same world as Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Martin Luther or even Billy Graham.  Like them, though, we can best tell our personal life's story in the language of our own time.  When we do we can rejoice when someone hearing our story responds:  “Yeah, I had something like that happen to me, too.” That shred of sameness makes possible the development of friendships that grow into community.  At that moment, when community is created, a low level sense of unity and understanding is experienced.  Community is an early step toward an enlarged awareness of the Holy Mystery that is eventually realized as the wholeness and unity we all long for.

Unfortunately, the story that awakens us to community gradually formalizes into creeds, rituals, and celebrations.  It formalizes into buildings with steeples and begins to declare that its story is the only true story.  At that point, religion often degenerates as an expression of spirituality and starts protecting its community of believers against the reality of life’s constant changes; against its evolution and growth.

The creation of community is a valid and appropriate thing to happen.  Every experience of the Numinous needs to be nurtured, cared for, and given a place of safety for its growth.  As such, the Church is a valid contribution to life.  It provides succor and sustenance to the transforming spiritual awareness.

But the church needs to let its own story constantly grow,  evolve, and expand in keeping with Life’s evolution.  If it doesn’t, then believers will be attracted to whoever tells a better story.  Seekers yearning for the Numinous will depart.  Spiritual beings will cease being traditionally religious, for the old story no longer satisfies.  It is no longer consistent with what life is presenting.

Science has become the champion story teller of modern times.  Regretfully its stories often give unnecessary anxiety to the church.  Copernicus and Galileo studied Nature’s library and unfolded a story of a sun-centered solar system.  That story trumped the ancient geo-centric system, and much theology tumbled as the old understanding that the Earth was the center of God’s attention came unraveled.  Darwin’s work accomplished the same by presenting a story that undermined man as a “little lower than angels,” and connected humans to all other forms of creation.

Portions of both the Church and the scientific establishment resist the reality that life in this universe is not static - as was once assumed.  It is constantly changing, growing, emerging.  The belief that “the faith of our fathers” is sufficient for all time fights against the present and future realities.  Despite wishes to the contrary, Life continues to change.  The universe is expanding.  New ways of being -- and maybe even new beings -- are arising.

The old story is not big enough.  A new story must unfold.  New images of truth must flow out to close the gap between the spiritual awareness and both the religious and the scientific stories that are important to our human need for community and an enlarged understanding of Total Reality.

It is the new images -- the new stories -- that will be explored here in this blog.

(to be continued)
Robert C. Ouradnik
Greensboro, NC (June 2011)