A CLEAN PIPELINE
All human life comes through the birth canal. So do all human institutions and cultural traditions, even church.
We receive a tradition, a religion, from our family, our culture. Everything we receive comes through a pipeline — a preordained, organized framework of beliefs and presuppositions that someone else formulated as true, for that period and place. It has a history; it evolved over time. This is as it should be, as parents and elders want to pass on what they consider important to their young. This offers our young a ground, a foundation from which to journey.
The problem comes when we are unconscious of how our inherited beliefs shape our perceptions and our choices, or are unaware of the history of how they came to us. We tend to accept only what conforms to our worldview, our pipeline, even if this pipeline isn’t pure, is contaminated by bias. Age brings with it the responsibility to return to the source, the beginnings, to the history of a thing, in order to understand how it came to be what it is. It might be helpful to review a short history of how humankind came to identify sacred energies.
Archaic man, as previously mentioned, projected the light outward, on to mythical gods who held the energy man did not. The Greeks began to study the light, thought man could know the light, like Plato’s images on the wall of the cave. These, too, were outside man. Hebrews introduced faith, the notion of light as Light, with the possibility of a relationship with this sacred other. Christianity witnessed to the light it saw in Jesus; then took it back and put the light in the church.
The birth of science came with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Then Descartes placed the light in the principles of scientific materialism and the mind. We post-moderns, a conglomerate of all the above, tend to place the light in medical progress, technology, in outside interventions that promise to improve the quality of life.
Go back to even earlier accounts — early creation stories – to review our history. God called light out of darkness, in one fashion or another, modeled for us how this occurs – with the mystery of birth, with the cycles of earth and sky, with the evolution of humankind from unconscious to conscious being. Why would God show us how to call light out of darkness if God did not build into the universe itself the possibility of light continuously emerging from the darkness, in whatever form this takes?
God, Life, the Universe, showed us how to do this, continues to show us how to do this. But we keep projecting outside ourselves – projecting the light outside ourselves – on the fickle gods of progress, science, medicine, addiction, anyone or anything other than ourselves. One of my clients said to me, in earnest, “I’ve always wanted someone to make my life come true.”
This, I believe, is what Jesus tried to do – to make our life come true. Jesus proclaimed that the light, the kingdom, the presence of the sacred, is in us, in our human person. We found that too hard to believe, blasphemous in fact, so we made Jesus into God. We couldn’t then, and find it hard now to believe that the light is in us. We built a church and put Jesus above us. The light was in Jesus, but not in us. We’re merely human.
Our pipeline – the belief into which we are born – is contaminated by our false sense of unworthiness and by our desire to have someone, something else provide this light for us. We continue to believe our saving grace is outside ourselves, when, in reality, it has been within us all along. This, perhaps, is what coming to consciousness is all about. And why it’s so hard.
If it’s up to us to save ourselves, we cry out, then we will surely fail. No, it must be in technology, in religion, in medical interventions, in science, in government’s ability to make a safer world. Until we are willing to “steal the fire of the gods” – again and again – to release the sacred light within ourselves on a one-by-one basis, we will continue to project outside ourselves and be content to see ourselves as lacking resources and waiting for a savior.
We resist the God in us, resist claiming the sacred energy within; we want someone else to take responsibility. God keeps trying to give the job away; we keep giving it back. We draw up laws we identify as God’s, project evil on the outside of us, and then build churches to keep us safe.
Having been raised Catholic, religion graced me with powerful symbols and liturgies and scriptures that fill my soul today. My metaphors have evolved, that’s all — my scriptures, my liturgies. My grandchildren are scriptures, nature my daily liturgy. These gift me with revelations of God’s nearness. By changing metaphors and meanings, I can choose to belong to a particular church or not. My “church” has taken on the circumference of life itself.
I seek the God of Jesus. If religion offers that, I listen. If music offers that, I listen. If a walk in nature allows me that, I listen. When that voice speaks to me within my soul, I listen.
Religion can be an external force that instructs the soul, or it can be an internal force that emanates from soul. I prefer a middle ground, a marriage of the two.