For those of us that grew up in the bubble of Christian Pleasantville, we experience a strange compulsion to divinize and Christianize everything we see. Everytime we experience something we feel the need to shoehorn our pre-conceived theological conditioning into it and shape it into something that fits what we’ve been taught.
Have you ever had the compulsion to say things like, “Isn’t God good?” and yet right after it leaves your mouth you wonder where that came from and whether you actually meant it?
Or maybe you experience something and immediately you seek to find a biblical parallel or Sunday School story that allows the moment to make sense to you?
Among all the recent stories of racism, systemic oppression, and a twisted biased outlook of law and order it’s time for the church to examine the ways we shoehorn Christian culture into everything we experience. Believe it or not, this pattern of thinking within the church lays the foundation of the societal evils of racism.
When we shoehorn our theology into all of our experiences seeking to christianize them we end up with nothing less than slave holder religion. We sanitize and adjust the narrative to appease our religious perceptions and become tuned to our psychological frequency.
Unknown worlds trigger our anxiety and fear. Just like pilgrims entering a new world we’re often told there may be savages that will need to be eliminated or assimilated. This is how psychology works. It’s all about self-protection and preservation.
This is what drove the mystic Meister Eckhart to pray, “God I pray to rid me of God.”
This is the prayer that reveals the powerful recognition that there’s no concept of God that can actually contain God.
There’s no concept of the present moment that can actually contain the infinite depth of meaning contained within the present moment.
I’m not saying don’t be a Christian.
I’m saying be curious. Sadly, curiosity and Christianity don’t often show up in the same room together.
Be a learner. Stop pretending you have the answers or slipping out of the discomfort when you realize you don’t.
May we have the courage to let go of God which in reality is the work of liberation from slave holder religion.
Comments