Finding church...at Unitarian universalism, at trader joes or with every group I stumble upon...

If my job depended on keeping up this blog I'd have been fired forever ago...but it doesn't!

I think and hope I am less cynical than I was when just beginning the deconstruction of my faith journey.

The only residual guilt I feel is that of not taking the time to share my thoughts with what used to be the key religious people in my life. With the motive of not wanting to start an insurrection or create insecurity among the fold of people which I called my family for almost 30 years I chose to silently bow out...and walk away. And if the opportunity presents itself, and perhaps with a little planning on my part, I feel it would be loving to take the time with a few of them to share what and why and all...about the journey I had to take in order to stay sane and salvage the essentials of what may be called "a life with god in the world, and for the world"

Huge leaps from where I was at last writing have taken place as I have talked with people, read books, and listened to my heart with honesty.  Sharing my faith journey at a Unitarian Universalist church gathering forced me to sit down, and track my story with many of the impulses which drew me into different aspects of it, as well as the hiding from incongruities and disagreements my heart had with parts of the story I was told was THE one true story.

Allowing myself to ask the silenced questions out loud to myself and to a few trusted travelers has given me the occasion to look at other possibilities of interpretation, or understanding which honor a high view of god and love without so much of what seems like religious people's baggage added to the human story in attempt to either define, or control or label...or identify who and how one is in or out (and if that is all that important)

My current place of thought is not too deep, or even sure (if there is such a thing),but it is honest and it is open to thoughtful challenge by anyone, including myself, anyone inside or outside Christianity or religion at all. I don't mean to be sounding like I am making a challenge about what I feel is THE truth, but more an invitation to...please challenge me....I need challenging, and prodding, and additional musings of spirituality and faith and daily practicing of love because for so long the field from which I tried to harvest these things from was soooo small and myopic. And it did and does offer something to the diet needed in the world to contribute to it's healing and well being, but so many additives to it have made it nearly undigestible to me....and I suspect to many others sadly, some of whom will never take the time needed to parse through, strip off and discover what is beautiful about The Story in it's simplest way (I do not claim to have discovered it completely, but I am not as likely to run away from it as others who have been damaged, shocked or disgusted by what seems obviously a perversion of something once beautiful)

So here are some really long run on sentences of thought which run on in me these days as I observe and listen and try pathetically sometimes to practice....

As I think about holy books, rituals, dogmas, creeds and spiritual practices held by people throughout the world, and throughout human history, it seems all people reach for some sense of meaning, of transcendence, of connection to something or someone bigger, better and more intuitive beyond or around ourselves or anything in our world... And that experiences of all sorts have taken place in this search which include  revelations of sorts about life or reality or truth, and may include ecstatic experiences or visions, words from "the other side" whatever that might be....  And then..... Through the ages these ideas and truths and revelations and practices are passed on orally or in writing....and ones which seem really important and "enlightened" or "inspired" get to make it to the Book or List or Mantra or spiritual life practice.  And then over time... meaningful well intentioned (and maybe sometimes not so well intentioned) people add to and or tweak the book, list, mantra, creed.....  

And maybe different peoples of different cultures over periods of time have gotten peeks into the Divine, the Ultimate Reality, the Truth, and tried with whatever language they could to define, announce, repeat what they experienced.... And with the imperfect perceptions and with the poverty of words, seek to encapsulate the moment to pass it on...... All this...... So others might carry on as wayward sons trying to find our homes...the centers of our beings....our place in the galaxy of life.   

And maybe our Book, or books or principles are kind of true, or true within a time and place which most needed them, but not for all places, times, situations. Except for the (it seems) universal MUST, of Love. Loving people, planet,self and god as we understand her/him....

Well it's hard to argue against love....and most won't. The messy and sticky part comes in when we try to decide what is love....what is loving...and for those of us with fundamentalist flavored DNA, "loving" is telling you the right way, Gods way to live.  And I get that....kind of....but it breaks down so quickly, and is so often self disguised, In-group decided morals which change with seasons or centuries, exposing the obvious frailty and imperfection of our "absolute truth".  And parenthetically, I am sorry, to others, and for myself, for the missed and damaged possibilities of connecting with "the other"...outside my in-group because of holding sincerely to such presuppositions of exclusion and pride.

How does this practically affect and effect my days? In every way if I am paying attention...which is... sometimes.  In my talks and meetings with all sorts of people...new people...people I would not have freely and honestly talked with before....people who I felt I had a superior view if Life than they...people who may have contradicted my world schema and truth view....with these people, I put all my theological shit aside...my arguments and truths....and I just listen to them. Listen to their souls speak and sometimes bleed. To the pulse which calls their name and which they try to lean into when life sucks...and at THAT moment I know....I and they are brother and sister....that we smile and sigh and bitch and get screwed in all lifes ways....and then we try...We try....and sometimes we don't...but we are not discarded because we don't....whether because of our statement of faith, or family values or because sometimes in the darkness of violation or the crashing of dreams of innocence we we say "fuck you god"....we are not let go....we are not dismissed...we are not cast away to the eternal fires of conscious torment..... Unless we choose to live in torment... But if we speak and walk in the honesty of our bewilderment before the Sky, before God, before the Ground of our Being....we ALL have the possibility of redemption.....redemption from evils face....from our own delusional proud house of cards, from the sin against ourselves and against Loves inescapable demand...of forgiveness and forgiving, of finding The Image of The Holy in the shitpile of what we tried to do....of how we tried to make it better.....

....in this....in these thoughts....sometimes remembered in my frailty....I am stumbling toward the truth....towards the Arms which have rescued me, held me, invited back over and over even though I claimed to know them perfectly while being a sincere ignorant confident bastard of half truths.... This I know.... I am loved. I am held. As much as any one else has ever been....no more....no less. And in this I am trying to be content.