Every once in a while, I am employed to help someone “deconstruct their faith.” I consider it a high honor since it helps me fulfill one of my life commitments – to “undo things.” It is #3 on my list I like to call “My Life Plan.” The text in My Life Plan reads this way: “Undo things – like Jesus, defy expectations and convention.” This is also one of the reasons I find myself floating away from what we call Christianity, but then also finding profound truth in the person and teaching of Jesus – he was sort of liberated from anything that resembled religion. He himself was floating away from his own religion (!!!). He was also deconstructing (maybe even destroying) the conventional understanding of faith, but also, at the same time, fulfilling the essential and best parts of it.
In true non-dual form, I think I continue to sink more deeply into the essence of the truth Jesus embodied, but also don’t identify with the label Christian. It’s kind of like I am fully that, but also “don’t call me that.” The term Christian has taken on a connotation I don’t really identify with much at all. I don’t have to tell you about what people think when they hear the word “Christian”; I’m sure you know. Christianity, then, is in real trouble. It’s not just a public relations problem or a branding problem. It’s a substance problem. What passes for the Christian faith is anemic, ridiculous and untrusted. I don’t buy it myself, even though I would still endorse Christianity as the closest thing I have to a faith and resonate deeply with some of its true tenets, as I said.
I’m at the point where I feel the need to reconcile what is widely accepted as truth from the Christian perspective and what is not widely accepted by Christians, but appears to be true for some different reasons. I’m just going to go ahead and say that some beliefs that are widely accepted and put forth by Christians don’t hold up. Allow me to give you an example. I was raised to believe that to go to heaven, you simply had to agree with a set of beliefs about yourself and Jesus. You had to believe you were sinful and could not uphold all the things laid out in the Jewish law, and you had to believe Jesus was sinless and was the only one who could pay the punishment for your sins. He died on the cross to save you from your sins. This all may be true, but the Bible itself also says other things about what it takes to be judged worthy that don’t have much to do with just things you believe. So here we are with a conundrum: go on accepting the conventional Christian beliefs or go about trying to reconcile them with the other stuff in the Bible, and with what appears to be true outside of that. 10-year-olds can form arguments that debunk these commonly held beliefs: “What about people who never hear about Jesus and don’t know they’re supposed to believe those things? Does God just send them to hell even though they never had a chance?” Right, that doesn’t really seem like something God would do.
This brings me to my current station. I figured I might as well be overt about what I believe because I’m forty years old and I feel grounded in my experience and I’m not sure I would care if you did disagree with me. I don’t put too much stock in people being able to logically take apart what I have come to believe through my experience and non-dual contemplation. That’s not to say I know everything or I’ve got it all figured out. I don’t. I’m just saying I’m starting from a different place and trying to employ a different kind of knowing. It’s the kind of knowing that is when something “feels right” and resonates deep in your being. It’s hard to get away from it then. Any time you’re faced with something other than it, there’s this nagging feeling like “something’s not quite right about that.”
Enough about that. I’m going to lay out in the next few posts what I deeply believe is the truth we can find in Jesus: his personhood, his life and his message, in contrast with what is commonly accepted by many Christians, and in addition to it. For now, suffice it to say I don’t believe Jesus was just here to die on the cross, pay for our sins and punch our tickets to heaven. I believe he also taught and modeled non-violence, a desperately needed practice and way of being, and that he also was trying to put forth a new way of thinking and knowing: non-dual consciousness. He was also doing some other stuff, but I’ll get into that later.
If you know me and are Christian, don’t worry. I am not “falling away from the faith.” I more fully believe some truly Christian things with all my being, and also, don’t call me that!