Last week I remet an old friend, a trans-woman who had fled Florida with her wife a few years ago to resettle here in New England. Florida had passed a law requiring everyone to use the public restrooms that match their birth certificate gender, regardless of their present self-affirming gender identity. The governor has threatened to enforce this law rigorously, and he has the ear of many local governments and police forces.
There is perverse irony in this development. It means that cis-men (those who self-identify as their birth gender) will be required to share restrooms with trans-women, and cis-women, with trans-men.
It doesn’t matter how ferociously we try to impose boundaries between socially defined categories. Reality will always continue to mix the supposed opposites across those boundaries—sometimes to greatly uncomfortable and distorting effect.
This difficulty points us to the Buddhist idea of the “illusory pairs of opposites.” The term “illusory” doesn’t mean that categorical boundaries should not exist in human labeling of experience. Rather, it means that we must always remind ourselves that our categories are conceptual. They are tools of perception and communication, but they do not define Reality.
In the last post I joked that my response to the theist/nontheist question is, “I don’t know. What time is it?” My point is not really about time but, rather, about the fact that my experience of sacred Wholeness varies from moment to moment. Sometimes it reveals a theistic aspect, other times, a nontheistic one.
Let me demonstrate.
My earliest recognizably religious experiences took place in the two Lutheran congregations my father pastored between my birth and my tenth year. I have clear memories of the first that precede any of my mind’s subsequent storytelling. The church nave itself was U-shaped, and it had a fascinating second-storey balcony. The sound I remember is that of old ladies singing traditional hymns. The second church was in an old rented movie theater, and my mother played the organ.
What both parishes had in common I have to describe from supposition, not from direct memory. I learned of a Galilean Jewish man named Jesus and the ways in which he taught and took care of the people around him. I learned this from Sunday School stories and from my father’s very humane, down-to-earth preaching. Dad’s message focused primarily on how to live as Jesus taught, not on salvation from sin or on access to heaven. This human being Jesus became my childhood hero and life-long spiritual master.
Only in retrospect can I see how confounded I became during my teen and early adult years. That’s when I was presented through catechism, preaching, and other means with the elaborate constructs of Christian theology, those naming Jesus as “only son of God,” which later centuries ascribed to that first century saint. I struggled to convince myself that I believed what I was being taught. Yet every week before Eucharist I squirmed with doubt—not doubt of God’s grace, but doubt about the elaborate Augustinian scholasticism that had buried Jesus.
My release came during my one term in seminary in 1992. I came out as a gay man, left the church, and took Jesus with me into the wilderness. The first century Aramaic-speaking Jew who returned his people to the heart of Torah rather than its text is also the one who teaches me daily.
Part of what I was struggling against was the imposition of a patriarchal belief system on a spiritual master who transcends patriarchy and every other form of civitas. In my twenties I wandered through Jungian psychology, feminism, and various aspects of Pagan earth-based religion, until I settled into the Quaker way in my mid-thirties.
All of those experiments confirmed for me that human reality is not grounded in beliefs but in experiential faith and practice. Secular and sacred is one of those illusory opposites. So is matter and spirit. And so is nontheist and theist. Each of these category labels is merely a nickname for an unbounded aspect of our experience of interaction with the Real.
There are times of joy or fear or grief when I fall back upon my childhood God language. Two decades ago, deep in grief and clinical depression over my mother’s Alzheimer’s dementia, the only mantra that would bring me back to reality was this: “God, keep me in your present and aware of your presence.” In this cry lies the reminder that the source of being I sometimes call “God” is always present. My struggles intensify when I imagine that I am somehow separated from being.
At other times, I find theism’s insistence on personifying the Real to be a huge obstacle. Theism tends to draw down the constraining structures of civitas upon what is a boundless and ever-changing Reality. At its worst, theism wrestles unsuccessfully with logic in an attempt to rationalize how a just and merciful Person could allow or even cause suffering. And, of course, theism wants a hierarchy of power and authority, with humankind at the bottom.
For me personally, nontheism and theism are not belief systems. They are just labels for how I am experiencing my interrelationship with Reality at a given moment. They point to which languages and poetic metaphors rise spontaneously as I try to articulate that experience to myself and to others.
Therefore, I am not concerned with whether or not someone “believes in God.” My concern is whether or not a fellow human being has found their way into communitas with others who share “the desire…to get to the bottom of the very mystery that brings them together.” Whether they are more informed by which questions arise than by which specific answers might temporarily come to the fore.
This communitas could just as well be a collection of secular scientists like Stephen Jay Gould, looking for the divine wholeness of evolved life and of humankind’s search to understand it. Or of ones like Antonio Damasio, puzzling out how the biological human body could have evolved consciousness and a sense of self in order to expand vastly its capacity not only for survival but for love and joy. It is only the unity of faith and practice in each communitas that truly matters.
This is what I look for with each person I meet. What is the most real, compelling mystery for them, the one that drives them to seek companions for the search? What is the ground of their faith—a faith they may not even be consciously aware of or able to articulate? What guides their practice in ways that arise from and are part of the fabric of the Real?
In the next post I will explore further what I find problematic about personifying the source of being.
Image Source
“Gender Expression & Identity Map,” one slide from the set created by Antonia Clifford on Prezi (3/9/2018). See “Infographic: Gender Identity and Expression” on Yes! Magazine.
You know Jung's line, "Bidden or unbidden, God is always present"?