“What does it mean to be on a spiritual path?” 

Many regularly ask this question along with a few others: “What is the purpose of life?” “Why am I here?” “Where are we going?” “Will I make it?”

If you don’t think these are important questions, check out the size and popularity of the New Age and Religion sections of most book stores.  “What is a spiritual path?” “Am I on one?” “Does it matter?”  All of these questions matter to us.

A common response is that “I am spiritual, but not religious.” 

A recent conference on Spiritual Activism intentionally sought to attract folks who describe themselves in this manner.  Given that the purpose of religion is spiritual development, doesn’t it seem odd that we would differentiate “spiritual” from “religious”?

When recently asked by a young man for help finding a community where he could develop spiritually, a pastor inquired why he didn’t go to his church.  Puzzled, the young man asked, “What does Christianity have to do with spirituality?” 

Many “spiritual, but not religious” folks distance themselves from the popular conception of Christianity: a religion of “us and them” which condemns those who are different, especially those who are gay or don’t believe “as they should.” 

Most thinking people I know assume that they must check their brains at the door before entering many, perhaps most, Christian churches.  Since their beliefs or lifestyles are not acceptable to much of mainline Christianity they, in turn, reject the churches and seek support on their spiritual journeys from various New Age movements or Eastern traditions that have been imported to this country.

Even though I am a pastor, I don’t I blame them. I spent most of my life avoiding churches, and still do.  My spiritual journey was informed primarily by the Eastern traditions, particularly Zen and Taoism and I was greatly surprised to find my life redirected to Christianity. 

I have no wonderful conversion story to tell you about how I gave my life to Jesus and everything got better.  Actually, I find myself in a constant tug-of-war between my role as spiritual teacher and the perpetuation of an institution.  I am reticent to mention to anyone that I am a pastor because of all that is projected upon me in an instant. 

It is from this vantage point, the vantage point of a skeptic, that I make the following radical claim: Christianity is a viable spiritual path.

Understanding the spiritual core of Christianity does not deny the traditional Christian perspective; all that is needed is a willingness to not be confined by it. 

Somewhat surprisingly, when you have journeyed through this expanded perspective, many of the claims of traditional Christianity “light up” and make sense in profoundly compelling and often startling ways. This orientation includes but is not limited to the following:

• Don’t worship Jesus.  Don’t emulate Jesus. Don’t even consider what Jesus would do. Seek what Jesus sought (and found).  If you find what Jesus found you probably won’t be anything like him, you will be yourself, and that is precisely what the world needs.
• The gospels are good news, not about Jesus, but about you.  The gospels are not particularly important as stories about a guy that lived 2000 years ago.  The gospel writers weren’t writing history, they were writing the story of their own waking up, their own enlightenment (salvation in Christian terms) and they set it within the Jesus story to be culturally meaningful
• Jesus is not “God’s only beloved son.”  Each and every one of us is a child of Mystery; and perfect.
• “Sin”, the great wickedness in Christianity, has nothing to do with being bad.  Sin means “ignorance”; not that we don’t know something, but that we believe things which are untrue.
• The Bible is a spiritual book, not a literal book.  It is not the authoritative word of God, but a book written by people seeking to comprehend a Mystery they couldn’t possibly wrap their minds around.  It’s more like a Rorschach Blot than an authoritative guide.  It is a mirror to hold up, with other contemporary mirrors, to see ourselves more clearly.

Many, of course, will argue that I have trashed Christianity.  Actually, I haven’t, I am simply providing a perspective on what Christianity looks like beyond its blinding dogmas.

If our spiritual journeys are a trek across an open desert, what appears to be needed at this point are outposts.  Briefly, these outposts might be labeled:

• “Science Camp” where Christianity embraces scientific doubt, historicity and a new cosmology;
• “Pluralist Camp” where other faiths and cultural perspectives are welcomed and celebrated; and
• “Integral Camp” where all dimensions, perspectives and faiths are welcomed at once. 

There really is room for all of this in the great legacy of Christianity. 

Do you ever feel like you’re getting older? I do. There’s a good reason: we’re all getting older.

How do you feel about getting older?  Most folks I know aren’t  happy about it; lots of them are just plain angry.  Why? 

Well, it’s true that age often brings more aches and pains, but other than that, why are we so concerned about getting older? Because the stories we tell ourselves about aging, and the story our culture tells us, is down right cruel.

What story do we inherit from our culture?  What story do we tell ourselves about getting older?

Quite simply, that aging is a “mistake,” a “failure,” something to be avoided at all costs.  Our media equates worthiness with youth, beauty and riches.  How many magazines do you see touting the joys of getting older, the sex lives of the septuagenarians, or the wisdom of our elders?  Stand in line at the grocery store and look carefully.

Death, of course, is the inevitable outcome of aging. In our culture, death is the greatest taboo, the ultimate failure.  It’s no wonder that Christian mythology rejoices in Jesus’ conquering of death.  New Age fantasies imagine us living for 1000 years in the bloom of youth. (Where we would all live is, of course, not discussed.)  Since aging is directly linked to death, we must deny aging in our frantic effort to deny death.

But there’s a different perspective.  What if death and aging are not mistakes? What if aging and dying are exactly what we’re supposed to be doing during life?  If we are religious, do we imagine a God that could screw up so badly as to allow such monumental mistakes?

It is a vitally important change in perspective to see the mental and bodily processes of aging as exactly what should be happening to us.  If Life (or God) is living out its fullness through every life form,  it seems reasonable that Life would want to experience all of the possibilities completely, not just youthfulness, not just energy, but also bodies and minds that are maturing, slowing.  Rather than seeing the changes in our bodies and minds as “decline,” a better metaphor is “deepening”.  The things we could do in youth with strength and force now require reflection and finesse.

Aging requires an entirely different orientation in the world, an orientation seldom available in youth.  Changes in our bodies and minds demand that we become conscious in new ways; that we attend to the world around us in more observant, elegant ways.  Our longer lives offer more of us levels of spiritual and mental development unavailable even two generations ago; receiving the gifts of longer life demand that we welcome those gifts in all their complexity.  Longevity demands that we make aging meaningful in new ways.  It demands new stories of deep acceptance of both aging and death.

Changing our stories is not easy. 

Most of us have lived with the story of “aging as decline” for many years.  But we can begin to change our stories quite simply: by telling each other different stories, by building local cultures in churches, synagogues and mosques  that define aging differently.  Traditional cultures have told a wonderfully respectful, energizing story of aging for generations, we can too.

A friend just returned from a trip overseas.  While there, she attended a variety of church services and sat with the elderly as they witnessed the slow but steady demise of their church. 

This is as true of the Seattle metropolitan area as of Western Europe.

If the public is saying that church is no longer relevant or interesting, what’s the point of keeping it alive?

At a recent workshop I finally heard a really good reason for keeping religion, and the church, alive.  It comes from a developmental perspective which states simply that our awareness, and our way of understanding, continues to develop well beyond adolescence.  In fact, if we allow ourselves, our awareness can expand throughout our lifetime.  This expansion of awareness is at the core of spiritual development and the importance of the church.

It is a truism that we do not all arrive on the earth fully enlightened, or in Christian terminology, saved.  No matter who we are — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, or an ordinary person — we develop through all the stages, beginning with infancy, progressing through childhood, adolescence and, hopefully, into various dimensions of adulthood.  Everyone passes through these stages, and everyone is free to stop at any point along the way. 

If, however, there is a mismatch between where we stop in our development and what the culture demands of us, we can find ourselves in over our heads and in great emotional pain. 

Much of the struggle and strife in our world today can be attributed to this mismatch.  The modern Western world demands that we see through the eyes of science and rationality, while much of the world continues to see through the eyes of tradition and myth.  “Tradition” is threatened by “Modernity,” and violence is an increasingly common response. 

The result is a global “pressure-cooker” as ethnocentric, fundamentalist beliefs run into modern reason and postmodern morals.  And it is argued (persuasively, I believe) that the great religious traditions have a pivotal role in keeping that pressure cooker from exploding.

The world’s great religious institutions are the ones, the only ones, that can carry us through all the stages of our development, from infancy to adulthood. Precisely because our religious stories are multi-level, they can nurture us as we pass through the major transitions in our life.  Folks in Western culture have abandoned institutional religion because it stops at traditional understanding while our world is demanding modern and postmodern capacities; hence the pressure cooker. 

According to this reasoning, it is the role of religion to find a way to expand the meaning of our stories to include both the modern world of science and rationality, and the postmodern world of paradox.  Only the great religions possess the myths that have nurtured us, plus the legitimacy to lead us beyond traditional belief structures with support and caring.  As such it is essential that we simultaneously nurture their existence and demand that they engage in fundamental and transformative change to meet the spiritual demands of the modern and postmodern world.