Part 1: Doors and Disonnances
When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
No, I mean, like, really changed your mind about something big. Do you know that it’s ok to change your mind, even as an adult?
Just so you know what you’re signing up for with this one, I’m about to share some of my personal spiritual/religious beliefs and questions with you. If you’re not interested, I totally respect that and I hope you have a good day. If you’ve always wondered exactly what was wrong with me, well, today may be the day you find out! Get a beverage and read on.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist church. Present every Sunday for morning and evening services and very involved in all the things. I was active as a teenager in Youth Group and as soon as I graduated high school, I was drafted into teaching youth Sunday School. I was a youth leader and the unofficial youth minister for about a year when our church was between real, paid staff members. At a certain point in my young adult life, there were only two days each week I wasn’t actively engaged in some church activity.
As a young child, I heard the Vacation Bible School message of Jesus standing at the door and knocking as a call to salvation. I was taught about the absolute importance of having a “personal relationship with God”. I was taught “theology” and Bible stories for as far back as I can remember, including some very formative years when I was preschool age and my mom would give me an offering envelope to scribble on to keep me still and quiet during the sermon. (I still draw like a madman during worship services to this day.) It’s an image that lives on in my head. On the floor on my knees facing the back of the sanctuary. The rust colored fabric padded pew was my drawing table, the “Baptist Hymnal” was my drawing board. The envelope, carefully and quietly ripped open gave me much more drawing space. My mom’s ball point pen was far superior to the tiny mini-golf pencils provided in the pew pockets. I’d love to have those drawings today. Sorry, I got distracted. Where were we?
As a young adult, I thought I had learned the Truth, with a capital T, and it was my responsibility to share it. I taught what I had learned about the Bible along with what I was strongly encouraged to teach through church provided booklets and study guides, to youth, college aged classes and eventually adult Sunday School classes. Some of those study materials eventually started begging questions in my brain. I specifically remember asking the pastor of our church a clarifying question about the words of a popular hymn and asking why the words seemed to call Jesus a metaphorical name that the Bible seems to assign to Satan. (Those hymn words were “He is the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and Morning Star, He is the fairest of ten thousand to my soul” if you’re interested in doing a deep dive on the other “Morning Star”.) The pastor confessed that he had never questioned the words of the hymn. Then he took one of his really thick books from the shelf behind his desk, flipped through it, read a few things quietly, and then laughed and told me I probably shouldn’t worry about it.
That question was a turning point for me in a very big way. Without my knowledge, that question put me at odds with the pastor because he was embarrassed and he labeled me a risk as a question asker. Within a year, I was no longer teaching Sunday School nor was I affiliated with that church, which, in hindsight, is a turn of events I’m so grateful for. That question was the moment my eyes started to really open. Maybe I didn’t know the Truth after all.
Nearly 30 years later, I have continued to be very interested in spirituality and religion, especially when it comes to the Christian flavor of those things. I consider myself a Christian, but NOT ONE OF THOSE KIND of Christians. I’m the kind that looks at the life of Jesus and truly tries to live a life that follows his teachings and his behaviors. I know that I’m not at the end of an evolution of faith and that I am still curious and still learning every day. I also know that I do not believe the same things I was taught to believe in that Southern Baptist church. For me, the Truth has changed.
In that early religious environment, I was taught that the Bible was God’s holy word, inerrant and quite literally true from cover to cover. Every argument ended at the Bible back then. A verse would be brought from memory, a Greek word would be explained and any argument would end abruptly. If you could not accept that the Bible was the final word of Truth then you were not just wrong, but you were also uneducated on the Bible or perhaps a heretic. Disagreement was not an option.
I was taught a specific doctrine of belief that indicated that Jesus was God, born of a virgin mother, that he lived a sinless life and that he was tortured to death as an intentional blood sacrifice for my sins (and, of course, the sins of all of humanity). This doctrine extrapolated that the most important thing I could do in life is pray a prayer of repentance and “accept Jesus into my heart”, followed in importance by then making it my life goal to convert all sinners, or to use the lingo, to “save souls from Hell”.
Oh, of course, that meant there was a Hell. A literal place of eternal punishment complete with fire, brimstone, tormenting demons and every soul who died without “asking Jesus into their heart”. This doctrine was all based on the interpretation of Scripture (The Bible) and when it didn’t quite make sense, we were then encouraged to have faith “like a child” (Matthew 8:2) and to just not worry about it.
I mentioned the nearly 30 years that passed. Life has a way of teaching you things through experience. Another really good way to learn things is to step outside of any echo chambers you may be living in. When I left my home church, I felt the immediate irony. The gap between what they said and what they did seemed to grow larger every day. Without my closest friends whispering reassurance of verses and platitudes at every twist of life, I was actually free to think my thoughts and attempt to live my life with my own faith in God. The questions rose more and more frequently, as did the disconnect between what I had been taught and what I was seeing as reality.
The first part of my life was classified perfectly by Richard Rohr in his book “Falling Upward”. I was now in the “second half of life” when the brain needs to make sense of things. Those disconnects, or cognitive dissonances, need to be closed if one is to truly grow and become what they were created to be. I think I got to my second half a bit late, but I was at a point where I was willing to ask questions and be genuinely curious about things so maybe that’s not late, just right on time. Strangely enough, one of the best things I did to untangle all that doctrine was to read the Bible.
I had read the Bible cover-to-cover several times as personal challenges. You know how I am with stuff like that. But each time I had read it, I had done so with a lot of prior assumptions about what things meant, the things I had been taught in that first half of life. When you have a head full of doctrine and you read something in the Bible that doesn’t make sense, that moment of cognitive dissonance is immediately filled with what you were taught in church. For example: Early in Genesis, God seems to refer to itself as “we”. I wondered why there would have been a need to make that pronoun plural. What does that indicate? That gap was immediately filled with the doctrine of the Trinity. If you accept that there is a Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you don’t need to question the “we”, in fact, it makes perfect sense. But what if, for a few minutes or a few days, you don’t fill that dissonance with doctrine and you just let the question linger? What might that mean about any potential personification of God?
I found freedom in that most recent reading. I was able to be genuinely curious about things that were glossed over or completely left out of church sermons. Those questions led me to read more materials by scholars and religious thinkers who may be located somewhere other than inside my early church doctrine machine.
