As a child, I used to draw Ordnance Survey style maps, creating landscapes, roads and villages from my imagination. At the same time, the Church was installing in my consciousness a dualistic, substitutionary atonement, salvation theology in which God and love and goodness were at war with, or at least at odds with Satan, sin and evil.
Today, I’m more interested in the various ways I find faith mapped in my human imagination in the context of wars pursued by an emotionally immature, cruel autocrat and the strait of Hormuz blocked causing a global financial and agricultural crisis while the USA spends billions on a trip round the moon and back to earth where globally diverse humanity struggles to maintain healthy, creative patterns of daily life, society and culture.
My Christian map
My focus is on core, concise Christian texts that have become the fundamentals of my faith mapping exercise: “I have come that you may have life, life in all its fulness” is my primary text. In my imagination, Christian faith and belief are rooted in a healthy, pro-equality, pro-justice Jesus who taught and practiced deep wisdom from his incarnate, embodied experience of God. All life, all creation is immersed in and infused by unconditional, infinite, intimate love. This is the essence I find in the Gospels, the primary focus of the teaching of Jesus.
I believe in telling the Jesus story – or re-telling the Jesus story – in ways that repair the deeply damaging MAGA/Trump/Reform/Right Wing, ignorant, conservative fundamentalist prejudiced versions of contemporary “Christianity”. They are, for me, impossible to recognise as Christ-like. Self-proclaimed traditional, orthodox, simplistically fundamentalist “Bible-based” faith systems obscure the Way of living with intuition, trusting our personal experience of the always present seamless essence within which we live and move and have our being.
I dare to do this – to reorient the fundamentals, the Jesus-essence. By what authority do I do this putting together of a variety of maps that some consider to be unorthodox and dangerous? I do it as an eighty-year-old gay activist spiritually centred clerk in Holy Orders. I am doing something not many people seem to be doing. I am doing it because I find myself involved with a Church institution that traps me, strangling my vision, courage and imagination. I assert that I am still growing and changing, emotionally and spiritually, in wisdom and vision, on a continuum with the twelve-year-old arrogant, intuitive, God-can’t-condemn-my-same-sex-desiring self.
Holy Week and Easter
Reflecting on the Holy Week and Easter stories over the past weekend, I have done so not thinking or believing that the Gospels are verbatim accounts given by, let alone written by those who witnessed these events. They are edited and re-edited stories based on oral accounts that had been told and retold and embroidered by the Jesus-followers, the first witnesses, the early Christian gatherings, and those who subsequently joined the Jesus-centred communities. To the oral accounts that formed the basis of the Gospels were added stories told to and re-told and experienced and embroidered by Paul (with the help of Luke).
The Dilemma of Christian Belief
Belief is a dilemma for me because I do not believe in what is rehearsed in church every Sunday and maintained by the authority of the institution as adequately representing an adequate vision of the Jesus who transforms life and culture. The Gospels and Acts and the history books of the Hebrew scriptures are not accurate, historical accounts of the events and lives they describe. History never is accurate but always a personal view and interpretation. The contemporary “traditional, orthodox, Biblical” ways of our religious systems do not, for me, embrace the essence and heart of Jesus’ life and teachings. We live with ideas about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit that are human interpretations of Jesus’ teachings and essence. All knowledge is developed and communicated through the medium of human understanding. Any distortion or misunderstanding of the teachings of Jesus is the result of human failure to comprehend. Throughout my life I have been trying to disentangle the ingredients of distortion and error from healthier wisdom and truth, trying to be more aware of and recapture and synthesise the essence of a holy, sacred, incarnated transformational wisdom that helps us embrace the essence of life in all its fulness.
Whether we are aware or not, all of us are dealing with myths and the development of human interpretations and teachings and corruptions of the divine human we worship as Son of God.
We continue to have great difficulty in distinguishing the unhealthy divine attributions that are fundamental corruptions of Jesus’ life and teachings from the Jesus’ essence that is the catalyst for healthy, creative consciousness that make life in all its fulness into real presence. One result of our failure to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy forms of Christianity is the epidemic of abuse in today’s Church.
The nativity narratives are inventions, creations of those who came after, drawing on texts found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Holy Week and Resurrection narratives have been edited and woven together over the centuries to re-tell the Christian story in a certain way and with particular intentions. All of them are trying to communicate and elaborate truths experienced by the first witnesses and followers, immersed as they were in a transforming energy of love, goodness, wisdom and justice.
Body-centred spiritual maps
I also live with a map or maps drawn from my contemplative/intuitive/body-centred mode of spiritual practice. Every morning I ‘map’ my body in thirty minutes of breathing-focused silent awareness and presence. I draw on the rich mystical Christian wisdom tradition deeply rooted in Jesus’ life and teaching and the experiences of his followers, the early Christian communities, the Desert Fathers and the Mystics. My awareness of the fundamentals of God and the teachings of Jesus is rooted in an intuitive awareness nurtured by the culture of the congregation and diocese of my childhood and youth.
Evolution
Our human imagining of God is as much a result of human evolution as is everything else in our lives. Evolution is integral to divine wisdom and process. My understanding of the distinction between healthy and unhealthy versions of Christian teachings and practice has evolved over the past forty years, particularly through my psychotherapy experience and training and subsequently through my international involvement with movements for justice and equality for women, LGBTQIA+ people and people of colour.
My daily contemplative Christian spiritual practice of presence
The development of a healthier awareness of life, Christian teaching and practice, of God, the Cosmos and all creation has evolved through my inner spiritual and emotional practice. It is rooted in presence and awareness, breathing, conscious of the intrinsic goodness in the core of my being, infused with the innate love and wisdom that is the essence of divine and human life, the unconditional goodness, love and wisdom in which we all live and move and have our being.
I sit, upright, in silence and stillness, breathing deeply and slowly, conscious in turn of my guts and genitals, my diaphragm (in passing), my heart and soul, and my head and mind, breathing goodness into my belly, love into my heart, and wisdom, consciousness and presence into my head. I am consciously open to life in all its fulness, immersed in the cosmos and a fulness of life and love, unconditional, infinite, intimate, the divine Christ-essence that is innately present in every human being and all creation.
The Heart-Mind Matrix
Over the last twenty years the evolution of my awareness of God and my experience in silence has been enriched by authors more often encountered in New Age circles rather than found on orthodox Christian bookshelves. A few days before Palm Sunday, I searched my shelves for books that might ground my thoughts. I selected two of Joseph Chilton Pearce’s books: The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit (2002) and The Heart-Mind Matrix: How the Heart Can Teach the Mind New Ways to Think (2010). What follows is a very brief, edited selection of ideas taken from Robert Sardello’s introduction to the second book. Robert is the cofounder and codirerctor of the School of Spiritual Psychology and author of The Power of Soul, Love and the Soul and Love and the World.
Noticing
Robert begins his introduction by reflecting that we are all imbued with the pathologies of the present day. Just noticing and becoming aware of these pathologies can be a mark of significant advance for our spiritual awareness. He asks whether we notice that our attention is constantly split in a dozen different directions. Do we notice, for example, our ever-present anxiety, defensiveness and underlying fears? Learning to notice and developing our capacity for noticing the centre of awareness we all share can establish or re-establish a coherence, an inner body harmony with the widest and deepest of spiritual reaches.
Too often people are overpowered by the negative effects of a culture of fear, addiction, obsessions, anxiety, insecurity and unhealthy teachings about human basics: gender, sexuality, intimacy, race and belief systems. Noticing is itself a spiritual gift rooted in our capacity for paying attention, an attention that can be both very focused and diffuse at the same time, both deeply here within us and simultaneously wide open to cosmic presence and energy.
Human “spirituality” and religious ideas can be primarily otherworld oriented and even anti-this world. This can result in an escapist spirituality, subject to unhealthy fantasies and resulting in abusive teachings and practices. To survive and mature in our contemporary culture we need to learn to develop a more searching, acute level of awareness by cultivating through spiritual practice an alertness to and trust in our innate spiritual consciousness. Developing our spiritual awareness will provide us with an ability to reorient ourselves from within.
Enhancing our spiritual life
Our spiritual life can be developed and enhanced within our own bodies, our consciousness, our souls, the innate spiritual awareness shared by all human beings, our natural state of being, existence and reality, our capacity for a life of deep awareness and presence.
Above all, we can become more aware of the intelligence of our hearts. Our heart is the centre of true intelligence, consciousness and awareness in relationship with our mind, comprehending a holistic, seamless, cosmic vision of life as sacred. In this way, our praying and meditating can deepen our awareness of being “here”, in this flesh, space/time body, and “there”, in the spirit, at the same time. The essence of our spiritual, emotional, physical life and health depends on how well we are centred in our bodies, in our hearts, guts, and minds.
All this is in dramatic contrast to our primary dependence on a Christianity that has been about salvation, good and evil, a dualistic theology and philosophy, a God who rescues and sends his Son to be a sacrifice for our sins.
Christianity for me is about being more healthy and spiritually human and humane.