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The summer I graduated from high school I was involved in a car wreck that left me with amnesia. I could not remember what had happened that day. I looked down at my clothes trying to remember who I was and what had happened that day.

Far from being an unpleasant experience, my brief encounter with amnesia was mildly euphoric. I looked at each person and each object as though I had never seen them before. I looked at street lamps as radiant art objects in a museum. Without a context, every thing I looked upon seemed strange and fascinating.

The insight I gained from that experience was captured in the words of French writer, Marcel Proust, who once said, “My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.” My car accident had been a free master class in meditation. I had begun to realize there is a vast empty space between our thoughts and that when we look out at the world from that still spot we experience everything is miraculous.

My memory of the time I forgot now informs my understanding of religion:

It seems to me being “born again” is no further away than when we stop looking at the present through the lens of the past. Religion is not trying to recapture a mythic past, just to enter THIS moment fully.

“Be still and know I am God” now says to me that the sacred is never further away than a quiet mind and heart.

The words “you are the light of the world” now say to me that each of us is the universe come to life. Our awareness itself, not our sectarian dogmas, illumines our world and allows us to share the life together.

In you, the reader of these words, the universe has come to consciousness. You do not need to look for a miracle more wonderful than that. If you but look at the world with new eyes your search for meaning will be over. You will realize that you and everything around you are the miracle.

Many people avoid the word “God” because the symbol is so easily misunderstood. Everyone means something a bit different by the word. It is always important not to fall asleep into religious argon. Religious language is a poetic attempt to capture in words what can often only be experienced in silence.

Whatever our source of being is, it is beyond the verbs and nouns of human thought. Words may lead us to the threshold of this experience, but only silence can truly experience reverence before a fitful ocean or starry night.

When biblical poetry said, “Be still and know that I am God,” perhaps it was reminding us that the word “God” is a symbol, not an idea or definition. The symbol “God” is a place marker reminding us there is always a mysterious infinity between our clearest distinctions, something infinitely deeper than our most profound value, and something infinitely larger than our vastest understanding

Language is incredibly important when it comes to communication but we must never forget that reality is a place language cannot quite go.

To reduce the symbol “God” to a mental image means to lose the awestruck experience to which the symbol may refer. The symbol refers not to a belief but to an awareness, not to linguistic understanding but to a sense of awe most reverently expressed by silence.

The Persian poet Rumi had a teacher named Shams Tabrizi who made this point very well I think:

“Most of the problems of the world stems from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.”

We often hear conservative clergy describe scientists and Atheists as people who “hate God.” If we think about this notion, even for a minute, we would realize how silly it is.

You can’t really hate something if you believe it doesn’t even exists. Most Christians don’t hate Zeus, we just don’t believe in him. There certainly are some people who leave the simplistic religion of their youth with a chip on their shoulder and, for a time, remain mad at God for not existing. Such people can be obsessed with attacking their former beliefs and in rejoicing in disillusioning people who still believe. This, however, is a very small minority of Atheists.

Most Atheists simply don’t find the symbol “God” helpful. What they “hate” is the pain and damage caused by superstition and sectarian ethics. Religions of love should want our faith to be purged of these impurities as well.

“Faith” isn’t when we hold onto the last shards of our religious teachings in spite of overwhelming facts. Faith is not protecting yesterday’s understanding from the bright light of honest criticism. Faith is the courage to willingly offer our beliefs into the thirsty flames of reason and science because we trust the Phoenix of hope will arise from the ashes of our former certainties.

A religion that has to be protected from hard thoughts will probably be of little help in hard times. Religion that crumbles before a good argument will probably be a leaking vessel as we lay dying.

The word “Atheist” is actually a theological word. It sounds like a negative philosophy, only because we are looking through a theologically narcissistic lens that measures others by itself. Most Atheists are not best understood by the fact that they don’t use our religious symbol “God.” The overwhelming majority of Atheists are best defined by their positive values- like naturalism, humanism and intellectual honesty.

If we are wise we will appreciate the harsh light Atheists bring to the haunted caves of our unexamined beliefs. A religion of love recognizes loving Atheists as allies not enemies. Only such radical honesty prevents religion from becoming a passion deadening sedative for the heart and a incurious straight jacket for the mind.

To be clear, I’m not saying we should reduce religion to what can be scientifically proven. The universe was not designed for humans and so neither our senses nor our reason can pierce the veil of reality beyond a certain point. Surely humankind will discover much much more about the universe, but we are simply too small and limited to understand it all. Faith is not waiting until all the information is in before we begin to live. Faith is not pretending to have a clear understanding of life. Faith is trusting in life in spite of its ambiguity and enormity. Faith cannot be reduced to belief in God, nor in salvation, nor in anything else. Faith is simply the intuitive sense that one is at home in the universe because one is an expression of the universe. Whereas belief is holding onto what we want to be true, faith is often an empty handed trust that we can be totally honest and still find love and meaning in our lives.Faith is our trust in life and love, not our belief in religion. Love wants to know the beloved. Science and reason are crucial filters to ensure that we are loving real people and real life and not just our invented beliefs about them.

When I first began to explore my own spiritual path, I mistakenly imagined I would be wiser and happier if I could perfect my separate ego. When I meditated, I vainly attempted to inflate my illusion of a separate self. I imagined my enlightened self floating free like a balloon above my suffering and boredom. I did not realize I had unwittingly pre-booked a crash landing somewhere down the road. For, unless our religion or spirituality comes to terms with the reality we encounter in our everyday ordinary lives we are doomed to disappointment. Worse, we can spend our lives making excuses for why our efforts do not really work.

Our goal in meditation, yoga or prayer should not be for our separate egos to reach new heights of bliss and wisdom. Our focus should be on coming home to who we really are and to our interconnectedness with all that has life and being.

The distinction between these path of personal enlightenment and universal love is similar to the distinction some have made between “shallow” and “deep” ecology.

Fritjof Capra distinguished between “shallow” and “deep” ecology by saying that “shallow” ecology is human centered. “It views humans as above or outside nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or ‘use’, value to nature.”

Capra described “deep” ecology very differently:

“Deep ecology does not separate humans – or anything else – from the natural environment. It does see the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all human beings and views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life.”

Our spiritual lives, too, can be “deep” or “shallow.” Whatever our idea of enlightenment or salvation is, we should find our roots in the real world and for the benefit of all.

Salvation, or enlightenment, is not a jailbreak from our own pain and from the problems of the world. “Salvation” is awakening from selfish illusion and realizing that we are cells in the one common body of life. When we stop imagining ourselves standing on the shore of the river of life, when we find our home IN the river, our problems are all transformed.

What we are needing is not a new and better world somewhere else, but a deeper, bigger and more joyful experience of the reality we already have.

There is no higher heaven than universal love.

1. Never assume just because someone is beating you with a Bible they’ve actually read it.

2. Even if a bible bully has read scripture they still don’t know squat if they don’t understand the punchline is love.

3. Bullying does not become Christian just because the weapon employed is a Bible.

4. Remember Jesus never saw, much less signed off on, the Bible, the creeds, nor the institutional church. A little humility is always in order.

5. And, finally, if as the Bible says the aim of Christianity is to love, then cruelty not unbelief is the ultimate heresy.

(Originally posted on my Facebook page in 2021)

My favorite etiology of the word “religion” means to “reconnect.”

When I use the word “religion” I am not interested in the sects or institutions that most people are referring to when they use that word. I am curious about how you personally put the pieces of your life together.

In philosophy the subject of “first things” is sometimes called “metaphysics.” It deals with the assumptions we have to make to begin thinking about topics like meaning and purpose. We simply do not have the information to put a worldview together and yet our minds will move to some sense of the whole of things. Science can do some of that work, ethics can do part of that work, art can do part of that work, but how do you enough pieces of your life together to feel integral within and harmonious without?

The task of metaphysics is both necessary and impossible. How do we experience life completely when so much of it is a mystery to us? How do we blend the rational parts of our awareness with the irrational glandular fluids that give our life meaning? How do we work around our tendency to believe what we want to believe?

Make no mistake, how we do this task of reconnection affects everyone. If my religion cannot stand the light of day my mind will live in the shadows like a toadstool. More than that, if my religion is dishonest it will call light itself a heresy.

What I personally believe about such topics as homosexuality, or a pandemic, or America does not belong to me alone. If my morality is based on my own cultural comfort zones, it will come to consider difference itself to be an abomination. Somehow my ethics must submit itself to a common scale or what I call ethics will be an exercise in justification of myself and my group.

If I believe the mystery of things can be outlined into human language like one of Euclid’s theorem I will be unable to tell the difference between what I can think and what can exist. To think I can privatize reason is an act of piracy against my human family and the web of life. I must rigorously test my beliefs and recognize that whatever belongs to me alone is but the shadow of truth. Life is what we share.

So when I use the word “religion” I am not interested in your sect and tradition. I am curious about how you are integrating your life within and how you are harmonizing your inner life with the web of life and with the cosmic process to which we ultimately belong.

Religion consigns me to caves of illusion if it has not learned to breath the common air and live in the light of day common to us all.

When Christianity seeped into Europe, Augustine covered the naked love of Jesus with Neo-Platonic metaphysics. Later, Aquinas constructed a gilded cage for love within the rational framework of Aristotle.

Soon Christianity would be tainted even further with the seeds of colonialism. Christian empires would feel themselves “called” to bring their Christ to the nations. Conquest and exploitation were justified under that mantle of evangelism. Unfortunately, the Christ imperialists praised looked more like themselves than the dimly remembered Jewish rabbi who called followers to leave just such systems of domination, to sell what they had, and to share the world.

Eventually, cultural Christianity would help give birth to a new Christ. Imperialist propaganda would replace the teachings of Jesus with the false Christ of Colonial Capitalism. Believers could still give lip service to love, but one’s allegiance was now to generic creeds, and one’s loyalty was to cultural hierarchies of power.

There was no longer room for naked love in the new Imperial Christianity. As capitalist empires celebrated Christmas, the cold dark night of the Christmas story was replaced with garish lights. The “silent night” of the new birth was lost in a cacophony of commercial music. Most tragically, the message of “Peace on Earth, Good Will to All” was replaced with nationalistic pride and to a narcissistic form of Christianity where Jesus served as a mascot for systems of greed and domination.

Jackson Browne is not a Christian, but, he wrote one of my favorite Christmas songs of all time called “The Rebel Jesus:”

“We guard our world with locks and guns

And we guard our fine possessions

And once a year when Christmas comes

We give to our relations

And perhaps we give a little to the poor

If the generosity should seize us

But if anyone of us should interfere

In the business of why there are poor

They get the same as the rebel Jesus.”

Whether or not you, the reader, are Christian, you have an incredible stake in this conversation. The insanity being expressed in the name of a nationalized and capitalistic Christ affects us all. Ignoring Christian nationalism will not work. Pathological religion does not leave us alone just because we leave IT alone. Bad religion does not die gracefully, it becomes predatory to every alternative point of view.

It seems to me this discussion requires that we not to get stuck in the dichotomy between theism and atheism long enough to find our common ground of sanity in the unifying depths of naked love.

I always find it interesting that early Christians were accused of being Atheists. To some observers, the threat of the early church was not that they had a wrong creed, but that they seemed to have no real creed at all. The “creeds” they recited were more like hymns than philosophies. Their faith could only be reduced to a life of love.

Bad religion affects us all but Christians bear a particular responsibility to renounce the false Christ of Capitalism and empire and to return to the naked love of humankind that Jesus and all great spiritual teachers have called us.

When I was young I thought there was a path in life I was supposed to find. Lacking information, I felt frustrated and lost. Here are a few thoughts for any who similarly find themselves floundering for a way through life’s fog.

First of all, realize that metaphors like “path” can be a part of the problem. The metaphor of life as a journey can make us feel we are currently in the wrong spot and need to grope our way to something better. We can only start where we are. In a sense, the journey is always to here and now.

The point of metaphors is to give us insights about living. Religion becomes a serious problem if we ever come to believe in our symbols are ends in themselves. By studying various cultures we can learn the difference between our vessels for understanding and the lives we seek to live.

Beware of any teacher who only knows one path. It is almost guaranteed they will assume what has been helpful to them will be helpful to you. A good teacher will be like an eye doctor trying different lenses to find which produces clarity of vision for YOU. Instead of trying to sell their own understanding, a good teacher will help us try on different metaphors and symbols to discover what is illuminating of YOUR experience. They will seek to deepen our awareness not to convert us to THEIR understanding.

Returning to our metaphor of life as a journey, we begin with our first insight: “We can only start where we are and with who we are.” Perhaps the most helpful advice I have ever found on the subject was the Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Patanjali is the person credited with the development of Yoga. He said, “Yoga is stilling the fluctuations of the mind. Then the seer abides in itself, resting in its true nature. Otherwise we identify with the fluctuations.”

I hear those words as saying that spiritual practice begins with listening, not speaking or acting. Whatever practice we employ should settle us down into an awareness of where our nature expresses nature itself. Whereas, we usually identify with thoughts and feelings, it can be enormously helpful to discover the deeper part of ourselves that is observing those “fluctuations.”

After we are looking out from our own center it can be helpful to contemplate what practices have been helpful along the way. No one outside of us can replace this particular work. Anyone who proposes their own path before listening to us is not a teacher we can trust. Helpful teachers listen first. They are not trying to convert or enlighten us but to bring us to our own center. They may help us remember what has “watered our seed” in the past. They may help us explore what has made our horizon larger and our world richer, but a loving teacher will never tell us what to do or think. Instead, they will play the caddy to our Tiger Woods.

Then, as we settle into who we really are, we become aware that we are expressions of something larger and deeper. We do not exist by and for ourselves alone. The Christian theologian Frederick Buechner had a helpful phrase. He said our life’s vocation is found at the place where “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

We must not seek some kinds of truth generically. There is a sense in which our common life can only be explored through the lens of our personal lives. We are continually opening to the universal, but a part can never know the whole without dissolving into something bigger than itself.

The third insight is to turn our life into a gift. We are all going to die and return to the ground out of which we have emanated. Our only choice is whether to die of something or for something.

It can be helpful to consider how to joyfully and lovingly give ourselves back to the common life. The impermanence of life means that faith is not holding onto belief or even to life itself. Faith is letting go of EVERYTHING and trusting that the wave can only go back to the ocean that has given it birth.

Hunter S. Thompson said it well I think:

“LIfe’s Journey is not to arrive at the grave safely, in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting “Holy S***, what a ride!”

So in summary:

If we are feeling lost, any path we chose should bring us to our own center. It should allow us to look out through your own eyes and feel through our own skin.

Then, we should travel our path in a way that enlarges our horizons and helps us experience other people, animals and plants as our one larger life.

And then, we might let our experience of that larger life transform our personal journey into a gift so joyfully and loving given that even our death becomes a fireworks celebration of life.

Back in 2021, Jane Goodall won the Templeton Prize which was described as “Celebrating Scientific and Spiritual Curiousity.”

Goodall’s combination of science and spirituality may sound strange in a culture where science and religion are often seen as mortal enemies. The Templeton website further explains they were celebrating those, “harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.”

Jane Goodall is the granddaughter of an open minded and inclusive Congregationalist minister. She is something of a blend of scientist and nature mystic. She wrote, “For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected.”

To me, a mystic is not a magical person. To me, a mystic is anyone who can be teleported by reverence to an experience of the common life. When Einstein praised the mystical sense he was not speaking of anything opposed to science and reason. By “mystical” I believe Einstein was speaking of something beautiful that could be experienced as a RESULT of good science and mathematical reason.

Science had already weighed, measured and dissected primates. What was missing was someone who could pair that knowledge with a respectful sense of our kindred bond as primates. Goodall’s work would require the best of science AND a very deep reverence.

Jane Goodall knew humanity had a lot to learn from animals. She said she had a wonderful teacher about animal behavior in her dog Rusty. “He taught me that animals have personalities, minds, and feelings. She also noted that while humans are the most clever species ever to have lived, we also seem to be destroying the only planet we have. “Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutan have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forests, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.”

Like Schweitzer, Goodall became something of an evangelist for the animals. She said,” To me, cruelty is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty, whether it be human or animal.”

Like a prophet of old Goodall declares that our survival is intertwined with the survival of other animals, “Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.”

May the scientist and mystic both say, “Amen.”