When I first began attending the Center for Spiritual Living, my Dad was really happy. I know he wished it were the Episcopal church, but he seemed to take it as a divine victory that I was at least going to some form of church again after an almost four year hiatus. As my spiritual journey has continued, I've kept my family in the loop, sharing with them the new things I've been learning. There's been a lot to share and after a while my dad jokingly nicknamed CSL "the cult" because it seemed to be totally changing my thought process.
Well after about a year of avoiding "the cult" my dad finally gave in and decided to see what it was all about. Of course that would be the one weekend that we would have a special guest speaker, the retired Episcopal Bishop and my favorite heretic John Shelby Spong.
I have always been a cynical Christian, a questioner. "Did Jesus have brothers and sister," I would ask during Sunday school? "Did Jesus ever get married and have children? If Mary was a virgin, what exactly did the angel of God do to make her pregnant?" I didn't like the mystery and I didn't want to hear stories that left out important details or didn't make sense. I wanted to believe in God and Christ and the stories of the bible, but some parts of faith came easier than others.
I first came across Bishop Spong when I was really struggling with my faith. I love the Episcopal church. It is the spiritual home for both my parents and has been a source of love, comfort, and support throughout my life, but at a certain point I became unsatisfied with the answers I received to my questions. I stopped feeling like I was growing. That's when I came across a book called Why Christianity Must Change or Die written by Bishop Spong. Here was someone from my church, a bishop, a leader in my community asking the questions, voicing the same thoughts that had been running through my head for years. People called him a heretic, a blasphemer and worse for ordaining the first openly gay priest, writing books about Jesus possibly having a wife and brothers and sisters. He was radical, an agent of change, pushing the church towards spiritual evolution. And what he taught me was that there was more than one way to live in faith. If anything I kept my ties to the Episcopal church longer because I knew that if someone like him could have a place in our church, then so could I.
And so it was fitting to finally get to see him in person at the place where my faith has been allowed to change, grow, and live. He spoke of tribes and all the ways in which we, as human beings, continually redefine ourselves in oppositional terms...the quintessential problem of US and THEM.
It got me thinking a lot about what Kathianne term "rugged individualism". She often refers to herself as a reformed individualist...and every time she does I kind of laugh to myself knowing that I am as yet still unreformed, but in the process. As Bishop Spong spoke about dissolving the borders that stand between us and our higher humanity, I silently examined my own...my reluctance to connect or commit, that awkwardness I've felt when strangers and acquaintances have poured out their deepest secrets before me. I've wanted to say...don't tell me, I don't want to know because then I'll know too much about you and I might just have to love you. But love isn't something you can really control. I'm learning that this year. Love isn't bound by logic or boundaries, it isn't like an animal you can teach to sit and stay, it roams as it pleases and the more reformed I become, the more I feel it flowing from me towards the most unlike souls...people definitely not of my tribe.
In my spiritual practice class, in addition to the readings, the various meditations, and the prayer, we also have small groups where we come together and pray with and for one another and check in on our lives. I have taken several classes at CSL and been in several small groups. The groups consist of stranger, many of whom I probably wouldn't have talked to otherwise....not because they're bad people or anything, just simply because they didn't particularly draw me. But this group has been unlike any other. Perhaps it's because this class is longer than the other ones I've taken and we've spent more time together, or maybe because it had a pre-requesite and attracts people who are more serious, but I have found myself filled with a deep, inexplicable love for these stranger. And there is reciprocity. We've become so invested in being together that we are forming a sanga...a monthly prayer group, so that even when the class ends we will still have a time and space to be together.
Bishop Spong's words once again captured my imagination. What if there were no tribes or if we actually learned how to be together as one big human tribe. Perhaps that's too idealistic, but in learning to appreciate total strangers that I have very little in common with, I guess I feel like it might be more possible than I'd thought...that the differences between us aren't quite so great....
No comments:
Post a Comment