Transcending monotheism

Today, and most likely for the rest of my life, I consider myself agnostic and am not a practitioner of organized religion or a believer in any one faith or sacred text.

This is despite having been heavily involved in The United Methodist Church from my late 20s to early 40s, including earning a Master of Divinity from a theological seminary and serving as a member of the clergy.

I continue to greatly admire the teachings of Jesus but think they’ve been corrupted by 2,000 years of Christianity as dogma, rather than, like the pre-Christian teachings of Confucius, the Upanishads, and the Buddha, offering timeless insights regarding wiser, more compassionate ways to live.

What I do practice is mindfulness meditation, which Jon Kabat-Zinn defines as “paying attention on purpose,” and do so outside of the scaffolding of any religious label or congregation, although active religious people certainly can and do practice mindfulness as part of their own faith walk. Mindfulness is a way of orienting one’s self to the world within and around you.

And I’m much happier than I ever was as a practicing Christian, although I certainly learned a lot, had some good times, and made some dear friends during that era of my life. I’m also no longer afraid in general, despite those fire and brimstone billboards littering interstates throughout the South.

Photo by Samuel McGarrigle on Unsplash

Monotheism

For me, it all starts here: Human beings have a common, two-fold desire: to be happier and to suffer less.

To paraphrase Rousseau with more inclusive language, “people are born free and everywhere they are in chains.” Each of us wants to break free.

That ubiquitous human aspiration holds true whether you’re healthy, invalid, or struggling with neurological difficulties; an affluent person of privilege; a person of color who’s suffered a lifetime of injustices; a liberal, a conservative, a libertarian, or an independent.

You wrestle each day with your own hopes, fears, and aspirations, and live with the outcomes of choices you’ve made in response to the contexts and situations in which you’ve found yourself.

Sadly, if you’re paying attention to how society rolls these days, it might feel hard-pressed to acknowledge that there’s any kind of common desire.

This seems especially true not only in political contexts but regarding monotheistic belief systems and practices, where too many adherents with megaphones insist they have found “the” truth and those who disagree are often viewed as lost or dangerous, commonly referred to as “them” or “others.”

Long ago Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, became a monotheistic brand advocated by powerful institutions and their equally-powerful leaders. A lot of good deeds have been done in the service of these three monotheistic faiths, but an endless river of blood has been shed as well at the expense of those who have dared to disagree.

Honestly examine any denomination or sect of any of the world’s major religions today, and you can easily punch holes in some of its practices where the ego-driven need to be right or exclusive gets in the way of compassion, empathy, and love. This dark behavior usually shows up when a person’s learning is hindered by self-imposed limitations; the unfolding tragedy of a mind not willing to be challenged to grow despite the eagerness of the brain to be stretched across a lifetime.

And given the proliferation of banned books, some people get less exposure to different viewpoints than others. America itself is steadily creeping into a theistic dictatorship vs. a democratic republic with dogmatic interpretations of the Bible rapidly replacing the Constitution.

I sometimes think of how many resources and countless hours are wasted each year because of the duality of religious beliefs; someone must be wrong for me to be right, and this win-lose (or even lose-lose) arrogance hinders compassionate vision by erecting splinters of pride, arrogance, and self-righteousness.

Thomas Merton once wrote in his many journals:

God reveals himself in the middle of conflict and contradiction – and we want to find him outside all contradiction…I am thrown into contradiction: to realize it is mercy, to accept it is love, and to help others do the same is compassion.

That’s one of the most profound among an ongoing revelation of powerful insights from this Trappist monk who died the year I was born. Contradiction is not only ubiquitous in the experience of being mortal in this world, but a harbinger of joy. Instead of fighting it, there can be mercy, love, and compassion.

But how we love to fight it in our desperation to find the answer, to embrace a system or set of tenets that give us an exact blueprint on how to live!

We fight it in the thoughts and words we use to comfort and delude ourselves when the contradictions and ambiguity are unbearable:

Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan, If it’s meant to be, it’ll be.

I call bullshit on all of that. I call lazy, non-critical thinking, fueled by a blend of anxiety and fear.

We fight the unwinnable war against contradictions through the offense we take, through defensiveness and aggression, especially when our beliefs are challenged. There’s so many things day-to-day that we are unwilling to feel; and how we demonstrate our religious faith, our political beliefs, and our relationship to the impermanence of all things reveals a lot about the undercurrent of fear that mitigates the possibilities of mercy, love, and compassion.

Here’s a reality check I’ve been embracing across my 50s: There is no pure black or white, good or evil, true or false. We live each moment in the existential nuances of contradiction, of paradox, of mystery. We’ll never get it all figured out.

Across my messy journey of flaws and mistakes, there was a long season where I was desperate to have it all figured out, to make my beliefs unbreakable.

I’m seminary educated. I was a pastor. And yet, as a relentlessly curious person and a passionate learner, when I kept coming across insights and realities that contradicted the bubble of my particular monotheism, I could not ignore them.

And the more I leaned in to expanding my openness, especially to eastern philosophies and mindfulness practices, the more impossible it became for me to go back into the bubble, to put the genie back into the bottle; and I have found freedom and integrity in that, not despair or disillusionment.

For every sacred text that insists it is the only path to God and peace, there are numerous others that make similar claims and even some that respectfully decline to boast that they have cornered the market on truth. To insist our way is the vessel of truth and non-believers be damned is arrogant, even if clothed in the best intentions and concerns for others. Such flawed beliefs foster division, marginalization, broken relationships, and, as current times and the last 2,000 years of human history show us, death and destruction.

Let’s take a cue from Merton and lean into the contradictions that are at hand in every moment, embracing more critical thinking so mercy, love, and compassion have a decent chance of mitigating more and more of our fears and insecurities.

Stop shoving some brand of monotheism down other people’s throats. Let’s be humble enough to admit that there’s a lot we don’t understand, and there’s no reason to see that as a threat.

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“Transcend” vs. “outgrow”

For several years while working on the early phases of this article, I used a working title of Outgrowing Monotheism. I now think the more accurate, holistic, and perhaps more respectful word is “transcend” and its various tenses vs. “outgrow,” “outgrowing,” etc..

To outgrow something implies replacement. You move on to a new set of beliefs or structures that better fit your current perspective.

To transcend something suggests going beyond its limits while still recognizing and perhaps integrating its truths. It’s less about “discarding” and more about “encompassing.” You move into a wider, more inclusive awareness where the old belief still exists but no longer confines you. You see the belief as part of a larger, more fluid continuum of truth.

My “transcendence” from “active Christian” to secular mindfulness practitioner didn’t happen overnight. It was a process, a growth journey characterized by milestones; just like my initial sojourn into Christianity in my early-to-mid 20s was iterative and not grounded in a foundational set of beliefs and practices from childhood.

It’s hard to see the full forest when you’re in the thick of the trees. And with rare exceptions, one doesn’t recognize milestones until well after they’ve occurred.

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Mythology

My first big milestone in this transcendent journey was leaving the vocational ministry at the end of 2003, a decision more than a year in the making across restless nights and Sunday afternoon blues, second-guessed as soon as I made it given its enormity.

I loved helping people, developing leaders, and various forms of public speaking and teaching, but I didn’t love the vocation itself nor the system that defined it. Leaving was the correct decision but painful and confusing to live with for quite some time.

The second milestone was reading Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth in 2007.

Myths (“mythos” is Greek for “story”) are core, recurring elements of origin, history, and psychological themes, found in virtually all cultures. These stories explain universal truths and values with cultural applications, including explanations of natural phenomena and origins, often as attempts to synthesize “science” and “spirit.”

They give explicit shape and form to a reality that human beings sense intuitively, with an innate sense that there’s more to this material world than meets the eye. Furthermore, myths address human beings’ constant need to find meaning and value in life and mortality, providing responses to questions that lack quick, unambiguous answers.

Myths spread across the world through trade, travel, missionaries, colonialism, exploration, imperialism, media, technology, and the creative arts. Collective myths gave sapiens the unprecedented ability to communicate and cooperate flexibly in large numbers. And, for better and for worse, myths continue to be selectively interpreted and leveraged to validate social orders, nations, institutions, hierarchies, classes, and gender roles.

Reading The Power of Myth poured gasoline upon my burning desire to learn. It increased my openness to studying other religions and Eastern thought, which led me to slowly push past dualistic and legalistic thinking and be less caught up in being “right,” while more excited to seek to understand.

Campbell “found in the literature of faith those principles common to the human spirit. But they had to be liberated from tribal lien…or the religions of the world would remain the source of disdain and aggression.” Campbell was fascinated with how comparable stories about gods could be found in “divergent traditions—stories of creation, of virgin births, incarnations, death and resurrection, second comings, and judgment days.”

Myths point through metaphor to timeless truths that are more important than the interpretations that cause so much divisiveness and bickering. They tap into the wonder of the ocean, the breathtaking expanse of a sunset, the majesty of the stars, and the preciousness of a newborn baby. They are a doorway to mystery, mystery that can never be fully plumbed or explained on this side of eternity.

As I absorbed Campbell’s teachings, I more fully understood why I had struggled so much to put together a strong, cogent defense of Christianity as the single path to God. I had struggled because this faith was not the single path, nor was there any single path, and the lifelong learner inside of me who wanted to keep exploring and stretching my mind was stronger than the inner monotheist.

For years after reading The Power of Myth, I gravitated toward dozens of additional books related to eastern thinking and, eventually, mindfulness. I also met people who had similar interests in these topics and wove them into their professional work, including executive coaches. Furthermore, I found myself becoming more invested in knowing and trying to understand people who were different from me in general: those of different ethnicities, races, sexual identities, and more.

Once I learned to look at familiar spiritual texts through myth-appreciating, metaphor-interpreting eyes, I could more fully grasp that no single culture or religion held all the answers. And while I continued to attend church and occasionally lead Bible studies (during which I usually emphasized the symbolic rather than literal interpretations of the texts), most of my learning, reflections, and friendships were nudging me further away from Christianity and monotheism in general.

After occasionally considering a return to some form of vocational ministry, by the end of 2011 I had finally closed that chapter. That was a third milestone followed quickly by a fourth: I stopped going to church and, perhaps unskillfully, wrote a blog about why I no longer considered myself to be a Christian in the manner defined by western culture.

I realized I had attended seminary because I loved to learn and study, with a lifelong curiosity about spiritual things and a drive to cultivate a peaceful heart and mind somehow, some way. And I had slowly shifted to thinking in terms of “divine consciousness,” a quality that was in every living thing, and eventually complemented that with a still-unfolding understanding from physics that living creatures are energy that’s neither fully created nor destroyed.

Today, the notion that a single book written centuries ago could proscribe life for everyone is untenable to me. It’s far more productive and peaceful to not fully let go of sacred teachings that you love but to loosen your grip a bit, embrace unknowing with humility, and not take yourself too seriously.

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Mindfulness

This practice, as Kabat-Zinn points out, helps us realize that a lot of what happens in our lives is a function of ingrained, automatic thinking and behavior. What we’re attempting to do through mindfulness practice is become more familiar and attentive, so that our actions, our choices, become more deliberate and conscious, more responsive, more aligned with our values.

Practice is not a naive effort to avoid feeling pain or disappointment; but, rather, a way of meeting each moment freshly and observing what we’re seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, feeling, longing for, worrying about—all without judgment. It’s a moment-by-moment realization that we are already whole and complete, that we have everything we need to fully embrace life.

And practice can often (although not always) elicit numerous benefits, such as reduction of self-perceived stress; remaining calm and open-minded; enhancement of cognitive abilities; increased focus and clarity of thinking; improved sleep; and reduction of pain or tension in the body.

At any given moment, we are practicing mindfulness or mindlessness—and usually it’s the latter. For example, as Kabat-Zinn notes, every time we get angry we get better at being angry and reinforce the anger habit. Every time we get self-absorbed we get better at being self-absorbed and reinforce the self-absorption habit. Every time we get anxious we get better at being anxious and reinforce the anxiety habit.

Each moment missed is a moment unlived and makes it more likely that we will miss the next moment and remain cloaked in automatic thinking, believing that time keeps going faster and faster. But life is overwhelmingly interesting, revealing, and awe-provoking when we show up for it wholeheartedly.

Crafting a better world

I would encourage anyone reading this to think more inclusively regarding those who don’t share your beliefs. Those persons are far more vulnerable to attacks than America’s collective yet differentiated, outspoken and silent, Christian majority.

For some of you, it would also be cool if you overcame a lifelong fear of an ostensible “hell” that has likely held you back from questioning your beliefs, even when your gut tells you something is off. And the whole dynamic of justifying a monotheistic god’s benevolence even when tragedy strikes a devoted follower also feels like a stretch; if you’re willing to feel it.

The more widely read we are in spiritual literature, the less clichéd and conventional our conversations can become; and the more meaningful the relationships that result. The world opens up to us, and such opening is a joyful experience.

In a world buckling under the weight of so many artificial paths toward temporary significance, we are more in need than ever of authentic, compassionate spiritual engagement.

This level of engagement will elicit even more meaning and joy from rituals and traditions such as Christmas, Ramadan, Hanukkah, Easter, Yom Kippur, etc., helping us focus more on the grander mythologies that always rest beyond the concertized dogma.

Imagine the human needs that could be better served if a majority of people—especially those with power and influence—began to see the precious divinity in one another, and refused to judge but instead sought to understand.

I regret nothing about my spiritual journey of the past several decades. It led me to where I am today, unafraid and marveling at how each of us is an organic, time-bound expression of the ultimate reality that is beyond all forms and time, always beginning and never an expert.