I think it says a lot about me that it's easier and a whole lot more interesting for me to write about questions and than it is to write about resolutions. Whenever I sit down to try to write out some of the things I've been learning this summer, it just sounds so corny. Like the final chapter of a bad self-help book.  And on top of that, as soon as I learn something new, something that feels like a revelation, it seems immediately obvious, as if it had been staring me in the face all along.  Everyone on the planet must know this stuff except clue-less me.  But here is some, mainly because otherwise I don't have anything to write about.  

I have trust issues.  I don't trust much of anyone, and I certainly don't trust that the world is a safe place to be.  I could go into a therapy-style litany of all the reasons why that is true, all the bad things that happened to me when I was a child and along the way, but I'm not sure that's any excuse.  Plenty of people who trust just fine have difficult issues in their past.  I think it just has to do with the way I'm wired.  

But I've been working very hard on the Buddhist idea of keeping an open heart, which involves letting yourself be vulnerable, which means trusting.  It has become important to me for purely selfish reasons-- because when I manage it, when for a few minutes or hours I can drop all my defenses and just be there, it feels so amazingly good.  It's so much better than being hard and cynical and closed up tight like a fist.  But it isn't easy.  It is impossible for me to ignore that anyone can hurt you, even when they have the best of intentions.  Maybe even especially if they have good intentions.  And bad things can happen at any moment.  (Remember the Northern Exposure episode where Maggie's boyfriend was killed by a satellite that fell out of the sky?)  How do you manage this?  How do you stay open and spacious, without feeling like you're leaving yourself exposed to every little awful thing that can happen?  

I have no definitive answers, but some things have helped.  First of all, staying closed up tight doesn't solve the problem.  It might make you slightly more prepared defensively for bad things that might happen, but for the most part, it doesn't stop them from happening.  And you miss out on so much by always being on your guard.  But more important than that, it's occurred to me that the key to trust isn't trusting others, or trusting the universe, or at least not for me.  The key is learning to trust myself.  Yes, this person might hurt me, but I'll be OK.  I can handle this.  Something bad might be around the corner, but I know from past experience that I can get through it.  I'll be all right no matter what.

Ack.  My scared-self is already kicking in again.  It seems so arrogant to say that, like I'm asking to be tested.  There are so many things that could happen that I would not be all right about, that I could never recover from.  most of them involving my children's health and safety.  But the point still stands.  I'm working on it.

Since someone asked me about this the other day, I'll say it here for the record.  You can, if you read this blog, tell anyone you like about it (of course).  It's out in cyberspace, anyone that finds it can read it.  I can hardly claim that I want to keep it private since I'm posting it publicly.  And honestly, I wish I had more readers, and that there could be more discussion.  But, as I've said before, I'm a bit shy about telling people about it-- partly because I don't know how they'll respond, but mainly because it requires an assumption on my part that they'll be interested in reading it, which is difficult for me to imagine.  That may sound disingenuous, but there it is.  The only thing I ask is that if you live here in our town--as many of you do-- be careful who you tell, as some of this stuff would be a bit controversial around here. But if you live here, you already know that. 

I was going to go back and go on and on about "resolutions."  But in the meantime, my cynical side has kicked in and I just don't have that much more to say.  how can you honor and respect the beliefs of your childhood when technically speaking you don't actually believe them anymore?  there are lots of days when that is where I am, and today is one of them.  Days when I think, I can't keep going to church, this is ludicrous.  But:  I would miss it if I didn't go.  I love our church.  It's complicated.  If this were all about logic and figuring things out rationally, it would be so simple.  I'd just leave.

But honestly, as I get older, I'm finding that cynicism is less and less helpful to me.  And no matter how little it makes sense to my cynical self, the mix of belief and unbelief, of meaning and lack thereof, is actually the way I live.  It's what is real for me at the moment.  But subject to change at any moment.

AB

resolutions

A little over a year ago, I decided that it was time to delve back into the religion of my youth and think through my experiences-- much of which has shown up in this blog.  In April, I reached the crux of it, at least as far as my own experiences are concerned, and nearly sent myself round the bend trying to resolve some intellectual conflicts that are not resolvable.  At that point, I resolved to let them be un-resolved. I felt like I had finally come to terms with the opposing forces, if you will, and made a truce.  Not a truce between the issues, but a truce between myself and the conflict.  Is this making any sense?  The conflict is out there, I don't know the answer, and I have to keep living with that.

I've learned a few new things since then that I thought I'd pass on.  One occurred to me on a long driving trip.  It occurred to me that just because the issues can't be resolved intellectually doesn't mean that they can't be resolved in my life.  I can value the meaning behind many of the beliefs of my childhood, feel enormously proud of and loyal to my heritage, and yet still live in a way that honors my own experience.  In effect, the way I live my life becomes the resolution.  

check back, this is unfinished.

It's been so long since I've posted that it feels like I should wait until I have something really significant to say. But then again, maybe I should just plunge back in. We had a great vacation-- two weeks, for the first time in a long time. Part of it was spent with my spouse's family on the East coast, part of it was spent at home. During the last bit, my spouse and kids took off on a church youth group trip while I stayed home. I got to spend several days at our favorite lake, relaxing and reading and watching the breeze move the leaves on the trees. It was great.

In the afternoons, it would get quite warm in the un-air conditioned cabin where I was staying. So after dinner the dog and I would walk down to the lake for a swim. The reason this is my favorite lake is because the water is so clear and cold and deeply blue-green that you can see straight down to the bottom even at fifteen feet. It's not the kind of lake where you swim all afternoon.  No one stays in for long, it's way too cold, even in July. In fact, I don't get in at all unless it's really hot. But it was quite warm last week, and I swam every day.

I think it says a lot about one's personality how you do this-- do you plunge in off the end of the dock? start at the shore and wade in? run in and dive? My own approach is the wimpiest of them all, which is to slowly descend the ladder at the end of the dock, letting each body part get used to it before the next one gets wet. But there is still a moment where you have to push away from the dock and plunge all the way in, and every time I do it, I cringe. I hate that bit. But then you're in, and the water is so .... invigorating, bracing, refreshing-- pick your term. You feel all the heat and dust and sweat dissolving away, and you just chill (giving new meaning to the term, yes?). I paddle around and try to find something, some place within myself that matches that deep, clear, blue-green stillness. It's worth the hated cringe moment, well worth it.

Great metaphor, that. I have several things coming up that I don't want to do, but I need to do, so it's a life lesson all wrapped up with a bow. Just cringe and get the worst part over with. Like posting for the first time in three months.

AB

I really did write a post yesterday, but I was worried it might be a breach of confidentiality, so I deleted it this morning. But I will start posting again when we get back from vacation.

Last fall I made a moderately big deal about taking a break from blogging for six weeks.  Now it's been six weeks since I last posted and I've hardly even noticed.  Plenty is happening, just not much worth writing about.  

I don't really have a whole lot more to say on this topic, but I've had a number of very interesting conversations about it offline, and I thought I would pass along a few things. (to the people who said these things: I'm not specifying who said what because I'm not sure if you'd want your name here, but I'll certainly credit you if you let me know you don't mind.) Some are from e-mails, some are paraphrases.

"God is just way too large to be contained by any doctrine or any so-called set of facts. He/She transcends it all, but chose to create us as unique individuals which I think is a signal we are also 'allowed' to be unique in our expression of faith."

"Right answers become a new form
of works--righteousness
excluding grace"

It was pointed out to me that on my list of interpretations of the resurrection, I left out the one where God the Father loves us so much that he is willing to sacrifice his only Son in order to save us. "thinking of the resurrection literally allows us a tool for conceiving of what a truly loving god would be."

And also. I set up for myself an "either/or" truly worthy of a fundamentalist: either the literalist interpretation is correct, or the metaphorical interpretation is correct. And of course, after having a few days to ponder that one, there are many options in between, including my own idea from several months ago: take it seriously, but not literally. But here's another idea.

I listened to a lecture series on the Apostle Paul last fall that was excellent. It was done by a professor from a major university, who may want nothing to do with this blog so I'll leave his name off. I thought he did a terrific job of running the gauntlet between secular literary criticism and faithful consideration-- a great role model for what I want do myself. He pointed out, as most thoughtful scholars of the scriptures do, that the traditional interpretations of conservative Christians sometimes don't have much support in the text itself-- rarely are things as clear-cut as the literalists would like you to believe.

But anyway, he points out that the New Testament writings were written when the new religion was still very young. It is clear that the writers expected Jesus to return any minute. It is clear that their emphasis was on spreading the news about Jesus as far as possible during the brief time they thought they had before Jesus' return. We don't know how those particular writers would respond if they knew that 2,000 years later Jesus would not have returned. Not to mention that in the meantime, the letters and accounts they wrote would have been used for both good and nefarious purposes. But it isn't difficult to imagine that they might have reconsidered certain points and moved on to different emphases.

It occurs to me that the writers themselves would be surprised that we were even talking about this. The New Testament writers, especially Paul, were Jews with considerable knowledge of the Jewish law. They had had to completely re-interpret what they knew about God's law based on what their new experiences were as followers of Jesus. I think it's entirely possible that they would be the first ones to argue that God's law is always interpreted in light of your own experience, your own times, and that this interpretation must be carefully and consciously undertaken. Rather than operating under the assumption that the way you were taught is the only way. Honestly, sometimes people who are strict literalists sound exactly like the Phraisees, who after all, could cite chapter and verse to back up their arguments with Jesus (just like the literalists can today).

AB

so here's one of the things that happened. A couple of days after I deleted those posts, I woke up at about 6 a.m. with this question ringing in my head, as if someone had just spoken it: "Are you willing to go to hell if you're wrong?" I spent the morning turning that question over and having several somewhat visceral reactions. It took me until noon to realize that the question itself was fundamentalist and not necessarily legitimate. All the underlying assumptions-- that there is a hell, that people go there based on whether or not their theology is correct, that you could be punished for eternity for honestly asking questions-- all of that comes from the way I internalized the religion of my childhood. It was such an enormous feeling of relief to just let it go. But then over the next few days, it came back. It's still hanging around back there in my brain somewhere. I guess you never entirely get over this stuff.

Well, you will be able to tell that this topic struck a real chord with me. I edited and edited the previous posts, then ended up deleting them. They stayed deleted for almost a week. But I've decided to put them back in, because I think they make a good point about recovering from fundamentalism. I guess I'm sort of setting myself up as a sociology experiment here (although if it was sociology, would it have to be a group of us? maybe it's a psychology experiment). I realize that if you don't come from a religious background, I've made myself ridiculous with all this dithering back and forth, but it is ridiculous, so I will let that stand. I did edit them (again). And I have a bit more to say, too.

AB

previous post, revisited

You know, if I were writing a book, I'd go through the process of thinking all this out and you, my gentle readers, would only get the final product. And wow, would it be amazing. (just kidding.) But since this is a blog, I'm still thinking this out, and I have reactions to the things I've written and posted that sometimes surprise me. So I have to confess that the post about Easter has crossed some sort of internal line for me. I'm really uncomfortable with it. The day after I wrote it, I came back online to delete it. But then I re-read it, and it seemed OK, so I left it (although I did edit it a bit). But it felt like an act of bravery to leave it. Then yesterday, still thinking about it, I went back and added the postscript. But I still feel off-kilter about it, and I don't really know another way to describe it.

The problem, I think, is that the two different ways of interpreting scripture-- the literalist view that sees the Bible as the inerrant (without error) Word of God vs. the more nuanced way of reading the Bible to discern its wisdom, how it applies to our lives today -- are so different that bringing them together in the same post makes me really uncomfortable. When I am standing firmly in my new way of thinking, whether or not the miracles of Jesus "really" happened or the resurrection "really" occurred is irrelevant. It's not that I don't believe they happened; in fact, I would be disappointed if someone was able to prove that they didn't. It's just that it doesn't matter whether or not they happened in order for me to read and learn from the text.

But if you're still in the other way of thinking, that is just so wrong. If you say it doesn't matter, it's the same as saying it didn't happen. And if it didn't happen, then what the heck is it that we believe? (someone in that tradition would say.) If it didn't happen then Jesus was a charlatan, a liar, or nuts. This is an old argument. We've all heard it before. But the fact that someone who was still in that mindset could come along and read the previous post and think that I was arguing that the resurrection didn't occur is very uncomfortable for me. Uncomfortable to the point of wanting to delete the evidence. Sometimes this is just so hard.

to be continued, but not today.
AB

Easter, a little late

In the process of trying to re-imagine my Christian heritage, Easter has become a tough holiday. It wasn't always that way. When I was considerably younger, I leaped straight out of conservative Christianity into a liberal Episcopal church where it would have been considered a bit naive to actually believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And that suited me just fine. I find the resurrection, as a symbol of the triumph of good over evil, love over hatred, and life over death, to be an inspiring and worthwhile story with endless layers of meaning that have little to do with whether or not it actually happened. You have the underdog, itinerant preacher with no political power who manages to outlast by many centuries the power structures that destroyed him. You have the man who simply, with great love and little fanfare, lays down his life for his friends, and is met (during the hours before his death) with hatred, cruelty, and torture-- and yet the love is stronger than the hate and consumes it. You have the symbolism of spring, the rebirth of life after the long winter, that resonates with the rolling away of the stone and the empty tomb--the endless cycle of life after death. It's an archetypal story with endless interpretations that really don’t depend on whether or not Jesus's three-days-dead body actually got up out of the tomb and walked away.

But as I've delved back into my past and tried to understand my background better, I've realized I missed some steps in there, some steps in the process of moving from a literal interpretation of Jesus' resurrection to the more symbolic. Because if you read the accounts of the resurrection carefully, you can't escape it. It is abundantly clear that the writers of the New Testament believed that Jesus reappeared to his disciples after his death.

Of course there are whole books on this topic. There are all kinds of ways to explain it away. Jesus wasn't really dead and he revived in the tomb. Jesus' body was stolen, and when the disciples found his empty tomb, they erroneously concluded that he had risen, and subsequent stories of Jesus sightings are just like Elvis sightings today. And then there are books by people who tried to explain it away and couldn't and ended up being converted (such as, famously, Josh McDowell in Evidence that Demands a Verdict).

But even if you accept that Jesus did die and was resurrected, the story is not nearly as clear cut as I believed when I was growing up. In the New Testament accounts, no one actually witnessed the resurrection. In the Gospel of Mark, the earliest account, a few of Jesus' disciples arrive at the tomb to find a man in a white robe sitting there, who tells them that Jesus has risen and gone ahead of them into Galilee. The resurrection has already happened. And that's where the earliest manuscripts end (check this out in Mark 16-- every modern translation includes a footnote that says the most reliable manuscripts end at verse 8). The sightings of Jesus after his resurrection and the interactions of the resurrected Jesus with his followers were added later, possibly decades later, and are therefore considered by some to be less reliable.

If you read it from this perspective, it makes a kind of sense. The kinds of interactions that are described are exactly the kinds of things that you would say if you were trying to convince someone that the resurrection happened—lots of people saw him; he was seen eating food; people touched him; my friend Thomas who is a terrible skeptic was even convinced. It’s the way rumors get started, and it still happens today. It's not hard to imagine that someone who passionately believed that Jesus had been resurrected might years afterward add a series of events that would prove the point, with no deception intended. They are just verifying what they are sure is true.

And, anyway, what exactly would it mean if Jesus was resurrected? Did the body in the tomb re-animate and get up and walk out? (Growing up, that’s what I always assumed.) Or did he rise again with a "resurrection body," a body that was physical, but different in some way from the body he had before he died? Or did he rise again in spirit only, without a literal physical body? If you choose your verses carefully, you can argue each of those interpretations of the resurrection fairly convincingly. But whichever interpretation you choose, if you're going to take the New Testament accounts seriously, you can't deny that the authors themselves believed most sincerely that Jesus came back to life after he died, however it was accomplished. And furthermore, they felt the resurrection-- not the teachings of Christ, not the symbolism of what he did-- was what made their new religion possible. Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians, "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." Hard to get much clearer than that.

In a way, it's my whole dilemma in a nutshell. I want to move on to a different kind of faith (and honestly, I already have-- there's no going back at this point), but the parameters of my former religion as spelled out in its founding documents don't allow for a this. I haven't been able to reason my way from literalism to a more nuanced understanding, because the writings themselves want to be taken literally. What I've done is decide that it was important for them, in their time and their situation, to be literal, but literalism is not possible for me (as I've explained ad nauseum in other posts). The way I read the Bible now involves some give and take with the text, some flexibility, some interpretation. and of course that is sacrilege to anyone who still believes it, not to mention the sacrilege of questioning the resurrection.

AB
p.s. just for the record, I would like to point out that the point of this post is not whether or not the resurrection occurred—I think I managed to avoid stating an opinion on that. It's just the most in-your-face obvious example of the difficulties involved in moving away from the fundamentalist mindset.

About ten years ago I read a book called Archangel by Sharon Shinn. It has become my all-time favorite beach read. I'm almost embarrassed to admit how much I love that book, because it is mainly a straight-up romance, and I'm usually pretty snooty about romance novels. Of course since it was successful, it is the first book of a series, which now includes at least four other books-- I've sort of lost count, beause none of the rest of them are as good as the first so I haven't paid as much attention to them. (Stay with me here, eventually this will be relevant to the topic at hand.)

Archangel is vaguely science fiction-y, although once the story gets started, that doesn't really enter into it. It takes place on a planet called Samaria, which is governed by a race of angels-- real-life angels that fly around with feathered wings. The head guy, the archangel, is forced to marry a slave girl, and like all Cinderella stories, it turns out happily after a series of obstacles have been overcome.

But the reason I'm bringing it up, other than to recommend it if you need a beach read, is because of an interesting subplot that runs throughout the series. What you find out, only very gradually, is that the inhabitants of Samaria are refugees from Earth, but other than a single person per generation, no one on the planet knows this. The angels are actually genetically altered humans, and they have abilities that appear magical because they are aided by a spaceship that is still up there orbiting the planet. The angels and the ordinary people of Samaria all believe that it is God who causes medicines to fall down out of the sky, or brings rain in times of drought, etc, but the reader starts to figure out that all of this is happening because of the spaceship.

Not much is made of this in the first book. But as the series progresses, the implications are spelled out more thoroughly. The spaceship begins to break down, and someone has to figure out how to repair it. And eventually, in the second book, the archangel (who is female this time) actually visits the spaceship.

So what do you do when the God you have believed in is proven unequivocally to be false? There she is on the spaceship, seeing the mechanisms that alter the weather and provide the medicines and so on. It is clear that these functions are being handled in ways that have nothing to do with a Supreme Being. But she has a whole lifetime of spiritual experiences that go beyond these pseudo-miracles that say that there is something true about what she has believed all these years, even though the framework has been proven false. So you might even say: she's learning that her religion isn't true, but her spirituality still has validity. She's trying to understand what that means.

Me, too.

AB

Surprise! a new look. I think it is spring-ier, and I am definitely in the mood for spring. In fact, I could get off on a tangent here with my annual whine about how slow spring is in the Rockies. But I'll spare you. You can just go back to last year's if you want to read it. I just went back and looked it up so I could link to it (here) and was depressed to realize that last year's rant was written IN MAY. We still have a long ways to go......... maybe this year I will rant twice.

But anyway, I just wanted to say how inordinately proud I am of myself because after taking two six-week courses on web design, I was able to tweak the HTML of this new design template (which was written by some amazing person named Douglas Bowman) to get it to look the way I wanted it to, and it only took me about fifteen minutes to figure it out.  Oh, I am just so pleased with myself.

and how often does THAT happen?!

It seems so commonplace to make a distinction between spirituality and religion that I've taken it for granted in this blog. And I still do, but I've been thinking about the two and the contrast/connection between them recently. (to define them briefly: I think of spirituality as the inner pursuit of the spiritual aspect of life, and religion as the outward expression of that.)

Most mornings I spend about 20-30 minutes doing... well, how do I describe it? I haven't really put a name to it, it's just what I do. It usually involves meditation, sometimes it involves writing, or reading some sort of spiritually-oriented text. Often these blog entries spring out of that. But there's no formal thing that I do, it varies from day to day depending on how much time I have and what I feel the need for and what's going on. And sometimes (and sometimes often) it just doesn't happen.

Last week, I had a really nice experience one day. I would even say it felt significant. It was very affirming for me that I'm doing OK and I'm on a path that's effective for me. I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it, because it wasn't anything earth shattering and if I describe in detail what happened, it will make it into something it wasn't. So suffice it to say: it seemed like a good thing.

The next day I found myself trying to recreate the experience, trying to get all the external details exactly the same so it could happen again. And it occurred to me that exactly that impulse is the religious impulse. The desire to protect and reproduce a significant spiritual experience, to figure out what made it happen and facilitate making it happen again. Like the disciples after Christ's transfiguration-- let's stay right here and build an altar and do it again! I wanted to spell it out, figure out the details so I could reproduce it. The impulse to codify it, if you will, so you can explain it to other people and they can have the great experience, too.

maybe more on this later, but that's all for now--
AB

The best thing about having read Velvet Elvis (see Monday's post) is that I think it will give me a week or so of things to post about. There's lots of food for thought in it, even when I disagree with him. Here is something that I will pass along in that vein (food for thought, that is). Early in his pastoral life, Bell burns out and ends up going to see a therapist. (which is fine by me, I've seen a couple of excellent therapists and have found it very helpful.) And in his very first session, the therapist tells him something to the effect of "Your only task is the relentless pursuit of becoming the person God created you to be." Interesting, yes? relentless pursuit. I like that. Who knows if it's literally true, but it's interesting to think about.

Of course, then he practically ruins it by adding, "Anything outside of that is sin and you need to repent of it." which is so much in the style of things I would have heard as a child that it practically made me laugh.

But the first bit is still worth thinking about.

We went to see the Spiderwick Chronicles last night. It's OK, but not worth seeing if you're not a fan of the books. My daughter loved the books and we wanted an excuse for a family outing, so we went. There was one moment that stuck out for me, completely out of context, that I thought I would pass along. The main character is Jared, a 12-ish year old boy who comes to live in an enormous old house in the country. The story revolves around a book, a field guide, that contains some powerful secrets about the natural world. The book has become highly sought after by various different forces, particularly an evil guy named Morgrath or something like that. Jared tells his great uncle that he is afraid of what will happen if the book is lost. And his uncle replies, "You've read the book. The knowledge is in you. You are the book."

Which is kind of an interesting new way of looking at how to interpret one's sacred text, if that's not too much of a logical leap for this early in the morning. Once you've read it, digested it, you've worked on it and it's worked on you, it lives inside you. Literalism is irrelevant in that case, I think.

the problem of wineskins

I've been reading Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (by Rob Bell) for awhile now. I read about a third of it last fall, and then finished it over the last week or so. His writing style drives me nuts at times, but his target audience is probably mostly people in their teens and twenties, so I tried to keep that in mind. But style aside, he has some interesting things to say. I found myself at various different points wanting to wave it around and say, "See, someone else thinks about these things, too!" Particularly when he was talking about inerrancy, although I don't think he ever uses that term. That was the high point of the book for me, since he covers many of the same difficulties in interpreting scripture that I have in this blog. He also pokes holes in many of "sacred" beliefs that turn out to be just part of middle class American culture. For example, he makes the point that he is put off by any political group that would call themselves "Christian" because of the assumption that all Christians will have the same opinions. What if he feels, as a Christian, that the most Christian thing he can do is vote in the exact opposite way? All along these bits, I was nodding my head vigorously, happily.

But I ended up being disappointed. He still seems to come down on the side of mostly conservative Christianity. He never really gets specific about many issues, so it's hard to say. It reminded me of a book by Philip Yancey that I read years ago, Disappointment with God. In both books, the author does a bang-up job of running through all the inconsistencies and difficulties of what happens when Americanized, middle-class-ized Christianity runs up against the wider world, although neither of them phrases it exactly like that. But also in both books, the author ends up defaulting (in my opinion) in favor of staying in a church that would be clearly recognizable as having most of the same flaws that they spent the first half of the book pointing out. The message, in both books, seemed to me to be, "Well, yes, you can argue that the theology of middle-class American Christianity is flawed here, here, here and here; but you know, they're mostly good guys, so let's just keep paddling along in the same boat with them anyway." In other words, let's continue to vigorously evangelize people of other religions, let's feel comfortable condemning the sexual lives of people we know nothing about, let's all vote Republican. I'm exaggerating, of course. And it's more of an exaggeration with Bell than it is with Yancey (although it's been ten years since I read that book, so maybe I shouldn't even say that). But what about those of us who can't do that? Who have proceeded far enough out on the limb that it just doesn't feel right coming back in?

It's exactly the problem of putting new wine in old wineskins. Jesus' use of this analogy is recorded in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). If you put new wine in old wineskins, the old wineskins will burst. It's a common enough metaphor, one that has been used by Christians for centuries in all sorts of contexts. Once you reach the point where your understanding has changed, where your reading of scripture has gone beyond the point of just being further out on the bell curve of the variety of opinions in your church, can you continue to put yourself in the same old container, the same old church, with the same old label? Can you just give in and say, "Oh, well, I'm staying here because....." insert reason here... it's easier than rocking the boat? my family would be so disappointed if I left the church? I really love the people in this church even though I disagree with them?

It's just so damn complicated. Because all of those are the reasons why I still go to a Christian church a couple of times a month, however grudgingly it may be on certain Sundays. Most of the time I don't have a problem with considering myself to be a Christian, as in "a follower of the teachings of Christ" (a definition I first heard in an interview with Bono). But my belief system has become so far out there that I'm pretty sure that if I were to spell out exactly what I believe, most of the Christians I know would say that I'm not Christian. One writer I read last year said he quit going to church when he could no longer say the creeds, since the creeds were (to him, anyway) the essence of what it means to be Christian. It's been years since I could say the creeds, but I'm still going to church.

I guess my question is, at what point are you so far out there that you can no longer participate? You need a new wineskin. I think I'm getting there. Neither Bell nor Yancey has reached this point, I think, since they leave this question almost entirely unaddressed. In the final page of his book, Bell says you have two choices: become bitter and filled with hate and leave the church; or remain hopeful and "reclaim the innocence" of your faith and stay in the church. But of course there are plenty of other options out there, including remain hopeful and reclaim your innocence and leave the church. which is why I was disappointed. I'd like to have some advice here, some input into how one figures this out. But it wasn't in Velvet Elvis.

AB

OK, so here's a theory. Best read late at night, which is when I usually think about it, though I'm typing it out in the morning.

Eons ago, before there were stars or black holes or even the universe itself; before time had started, there existed a Something that was Everything. There are no good words to describe this Something, because our words are bound by time and our sense of space and dimension. This Something can hardly even be imagined, let alone understood. But we must call it something, so we will call it Bob. Bob is a vast field of everything, holding all potential within itself. Everything that might ever exist is present in nascent form in Bob: light and dark, heavy and light, wet and dry, existence and non-existence. But since Bob is everything and everything is Bob, Bob cannot understand who or what it is, or why it exists, or what it might be able to be. So Bob decides to make itself into something, to more or less activate its potential and see what happens.

And in that instant, the Universe begins. Father Time winds up his clock. Mother Universe unfurls her starry cloak. The Big Bang occurs, to use language that is already becoming archaic. And it takes all of it -- all the stars in all of the galaxies, all of the black holes, all of the planets, all of the mountains and lakes and highways and skyscrapers, all of the life forms, starfish and hooded mergansers and oak trees and turtles and mosquitoes; all kinds of humans-- willful two-year-olds and crotchety 89-year-olds and bright-eyed 18-year-olds-- whatever life forms exist on other planets -- all of it, to express what/who Bob is. All of it. Bob is every atom, every quark, every gluon. Bob is always watching, learning, figuring things out, understanding what it is, what the totality of everything is.

And a further interesting part of this theory. Bob is also still there behind everything, the original vast Something, and you and I can interact with it. But Bob doesn't have a preset personality, a character or a way of being that would make sense to you and me. It is far too vast for that, far beyond what our tiny minds can comprehend. When we interact with Bob, to some extent we get what we expect. If we expect loving acceptance, there it is. If we expect a cruel and demanding taskmaster, OK, Bob can do that, too. If we expect nothing but sensory input, that's all you'll get.

So, that's all. No conclusions, just some late night ideas. Apologies for calling Bob "it" but it seemed much better than assigning a gender, and there's no other way to do it in English. I think you can sort of fit this in with string theory if you allow for more than one Bob. Or if Bob is so immeasurably vast that it can manage gazillions of universes with ease, I suppose.

AB

I changed my profile to read that I am a "Buddhist Christian skeptic" recently, but I'm changing it back. "Agnostic" may not have precisely the meaning that I want, but it's better than skeptic. Maybe I should just change it to "terminally undecided."

more accurate.

AB