More Than Words: A Thank You and Introduction

It’s interesting, I love reading Spong now for the exact opposite reason I first loved reading Spong.

Let me explain.

I’ve been a devout Christian my entire life. From the somewhat conservative thinking Greystone Baptist Church of my childhood to the progressive thinking Presbyterian Church of the Covenant where I currently serve as Interim minister I have never lost my “soul deep” belief in God.

As you might guess, from the lifelong journey from conservative theology to progressive theology that I just hinted at, I went through what some might call a crisis of belief at some point. Personally, I just think of it as intellectual curiosity. I suspect that many of you have had the same experience or may currently be on such an equally enlightening, and temporarily unsettling, journey.

I can barely begin to list the folks who pulled me into, and ultimately through, my desert journey of questioning and soul seeking. They include folks like Diana Butler Bass who, at the time, I only knew through her books, but now am fortunate enough to call “friend,” and folks like Phyllis Tickle who, outside of one brief “hello” at The Wild Goose Festival, I only knew through her words.

Through their writing, Bass, Tickle, and many others, began to awaken within me this “thing” that just knew that much of what I’d been taught in church was not necessarily the actual Gospel even though it frequently was taught as if it were. So, while it is true that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us (Thank you Bass and Tickle!), it is also true that sometimes we find ourselves under the shoe of those who came before us, even if we end up there via the best intentions of those wearing them (as was the case with some of the earlier churches I attended.)

I suppose I came into this recognition, dare I say “conversion,” a little late in life, particularly considering the penchant for learning that unexpectedly took hold of me during my first undergraduate degree. It was actually a full decade later that my growing need to pick apart things and understand them rolled over into my faith.

With the progressive voices I was already reading spurring me on, I picked up Spong’s book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

Part of why I’ve spent a bit of time hashing over my faith journey was to help in understanding how excited the title of this book made me. Up to this point, I’d heard of Spong, but admittedly, had never read anything by him.

You know that hopeful, anticipatory feeling you get when just enough of something exciting has been revealed and something inside of you sort of leaps at the sight of it? Well, I don’t specifically remember thinking or flat-out saying, “This could very well be a kindred spirit,” but I do very specifically remember that “something inside” me leaping as I read the title.

Three sentences into the preface, that something inside of me that leaped at the title of the book began doing summersaults and back flips: “[This book] is my witness as one who desires to worship as a citizen of the modern world and to be able to think as I worship.” (My emphasis.)

Ironically, it is sometimes difficult to actually put into words the degree to which a few simple words strung together can have an impact on you. That is not to say it is difficult or surprising that words can have a significant impact on us. Indeed, most of my spiritual journey from traditionalism to the place I am now, is based primarily on the words of folks like Spong, Bass, and Tickle. I suspect, with the exception of whose words you may be speaking of, the same is true for many of you. I’m simply saying that sometimes the depth with which a few simple words connect with you can be surprising and even, at times, life changing. For me those words were “to be able to think as I worship.”

Reading that back, there’s a small prideful piece of me that is a bit embarrassed. Was it really that earth-shattering of an idea to me? Had I really spent most of my life in worship not thinking? With scripture reminding me that wisdom is a thing in which God delights daily (Proverbs 8:30), had I truly found myself in a place of simple rote and ritual?

In short, yes.

As Spong has a tendency to do for me (frequently even unintentionally), the next thing I read confirmed the answer to my question. Chapter 1 opens with the title, “On Saying the Christian Creed with Honesty.” At that point in my spiritual journey, along with the droning way the Lord’s Prayer was recited, this was the very thing that I happened to be struggling with about worship.

Down the rabbit whole I went.

It’s not that I wasn’t already on a strange and, at times, unsettling journey of personal, spiritual reformation, as much as it was that the opening to his book pulled me even further in in terms of intellectual curiosity and commitment.

This is not meant to be a review of the book nor is it meant to place Spong on a gilded pedestal, rather it is meant to be a heartfelt and personal “thank you” to Bishop Spong, both for the role his words have played in my journey and for his willingness to allow my words to now contribute to this movement that he’s played such an essential role in creating. In that, I suppose this is also a bit of an introduction to me.

I first loved reading Spong because he challenged me to breakout of my traditional theological perspectives. For that matter, he also gave me permission to thoughtfully challenge existing dogma.

And I have.

I dare say it was precisely my willingness to do so in a public matter that has given me this somewhat unimaginable opportunity to join with such a distinguished group of folks to help continue the conversation.

Which brings me to why I love reading Spong now. While I first loved reading Spong for how “he challenged me to breakout of my traditional theological perspectives,” I now love reading Spong for how he encourages me to reform my theological perspectives outside of the dogmatic foundations that had once so heavily influenced me. That is a gift from him and from all the others whose words have helped guide and encourage me on this journey. I suspect the same is true for many of you.

I’ve mentioned words a great deal in this reflection, so I’d like to conclude with some thoughts on the importance of words, as well as the limitations of words.

To dip back into the Alice in Wonderland well, one of my favorite exchanges is between Alice and Humpty Dumpty:

As Spong says early on in Why Christianity Must Change or Die:

I am a lover of words. I love to play with them and to arrange them and to try to find interesting ways to engage the reader’s mind with them. And yet, I fully recognize that frequently, when it comes to God and things of God, I am trying to outwardly express something about my own inward reality. While, for me, words are my best tools for doing so, I also recognize they are massively limiting for trying to express the mystery that is God.

Our religious ancestors saw the value in words. They valued them so highly, they seemed to believe that to know a name gave you some holding, some influence, over them. Today we still use words to gain influence over others; we just tend to not give them as much of a mystical power as our ancestors did.

In a world of social media, in spite of all of their limitations and unfortunate lack of magical powers, words do have the power to connect us, confound us, challenge us, and even inspire us. Or as Aldous Huxley says in A Brave New World, “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

Spong’s words have positively pierced so many of us. We are fortunate that even as he confronts his physical health issues, his words are still available to us to confront our spiritual perspectives.

So, in full recognition of the limitations of word to outwardly express an inward reality, to Bishop Spong I’d like to offer my deepest and sincerest, “Thanks.”

~Mark Sandlin

Read the essay online here.

About the Author

Mark Sandlin is an ordained PC (USA) minister serving at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant in Greensboro, NC. He received his Master of Divinity from Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity. Mark is a co-founder of The Christian Left and blogs at The God Article. He has been featured on NPR’s The Story with Dick Gordon as well as PBS’s Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin

Thanks, Kevin, for the article.  How wonderful to know Bishop Spong and write about him with deep appreciation.  The article brought to mind how difficult it was to have students who came to campus ministry to buttress up doctrines and beliefs when those aspects of the Faith were not the most meaningful to me.  I found discussions about conforming to a particular theological ‘rule’ painful because the academic setting was already challenging so many students’ world views and students were in so much distress.  Many of those students left for more conservative campus ministry groups.  The ones who stayed agreed to disagree and/or found common ground with our group.  Often students who stayed with the ministry would continue to try to change the direction of the group towards conformity to their point of view.  It was challenging because there was continual tension.  Being retired is great because there isn’t that tension.  The down side is not being invited into a young generation and understanding the Faith from their perspective.  It was exciting and fun to learn from the young adults that the church had nurtured and sent on to college.

How do you communicate compassion for those who find meaning and comfort in doctrine and belief while at the same time being uncomfortable with faith based on doctrine and belief?
 

Dear Margie,

The deepest longing of the human soul is to know the truth of who she is; to know immediately and directly that Being is her being. Within the spiritual tradition this longing is spoken of as the desire to know our true self, or in the Christian tradition, our Christ-self. The Delphic oracle spoke this most ancient wisdom by reminding us to “know thyself”. To not know who we are, often spoke of as being lost in a veil of tears, is the deepest suffering we each can experience. I begin here because all too often popular culture misconstrues the meaning of compassion.

According to the wisdom tradition, compassion does not mean that we try to take away someone’s soulful suffering (indeed, there may be good reason for it); although that is how it is so often understood in pastoral care. Rather, we can appreciate compassion as having to do with being faithful to our journey into the heartland of truth, whatever the cost. This heartland journey of the soul is one in which the Spirit continually invites us to see through the veils, obscurations, misunderstandings, that cloud our vision and confuse our heart; it is often painful work to see through our identifications and attachments, because it often feels as if our survival is at stake. And in a sense it is. Most of us would much rather grow without changing a bit, which is simply how the ego is. In truth, for us to authentically grow we cannot cling to who we have taken ourselves to be. The purpose of spiritual maturation is neither to accept or reject a particular doctrine or belief, but to grow in our understanding of ourselves as a person who thirsts to know the truth of who we are.

Within this vision, a spiritual guide is someone who encourages us to risk the journey of becoming an adult. After all, the question Jesus asks his friends, “who do you say that I am,” is a variation of the Delphic oracle – who do each of us say, or understand, ourselves to be? The dominant form of religion has done a great disservice in abandoning this spiritual journey for the thin and barren land of propositional doctrine and creedal belief. As a result, as Jacob Needleman wrote so clearly late last century, it has become lost. Our youth suffer the consequences, because all too often, in the matters of spirituality and inquiry, we have left them to fend for themselves as adults with the spiritual tools of childhood. We would not settle for the study of geometry, or biology, or music, to remain stunted with Euclid, Emilie du Chatelet or Mendel, or Pythagoras; all great thinkers, but their fields continue to evolve and flourish. Yet, in essence, that is what tends to happen with our youth. They have been reared on biblical literalism through bible study, worship, hymnody, prayer and preaching. The existential crisis they experience at university, in many respects, is healthy and utterly necessary, if they are to become adults.

The inadequately expressed doctrines and beliefs concerning such matters as creation, virgin birth, incarnation, original sin, are unnecessarily rigid and confining containers strangling the deepest longings of the maturing human heart. Again, the point of spiritual education is not to accept or reject but to understand with our heart, our mind, and our body. Our souls yearn with every fiber of their being to experience the confluence of science and spirituality, language and art, history and ritual. The human soul simply cannot thrive on a segmented life. Authentic compassion flows from the realization that Being itself is the Holy Source inviting the soul to question and inquire without end, because the Mystery itself is inexhaustible.

~Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

About the Author

Kevin G. Thew Forrester is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including “I Have Called You Friends“, “Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms“, and “My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You” and “Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland“.