thread: 2007-01-04 : Self-identification vs. Membership
On 2007-01-12, Ian Burton-Oakes wrote:
I am so deeply, formally Christian and, yet, so not Christian when it comes to the content of my beliefs that, well, it always sort of bowls me over.
I really like Sydney's quote way back up referencing Kierkegaard, because conversion continues to be the defining moment of religion proper for me. I am not saying you can't have that moment within a faith in which you were raised, but without it, the religion is never more than a nice social network (which is nothing to shake a stick at, btw, there is tons to recommend that being mighty cool...we are social apes).
That conversion moment defines religious experience, the point at which you recognize, with all the intuitive intimacy that term suggests, the spiritual forces with which you will (gladly, eagerly) then take up a spiritual path to better relate to them. Two big factors there: recognition and practice. It's that reflexive moment.
I like Duns Scotus for this—the act of the will selects the level according to which the intellect makes its determinations. In other words, the rational follows the will, the call that 'selects' the sort of world in which you live. Any argument from reason botches it, it replaces the sincere act of will with the relations that follow from it.
The sincerity of the heart, if you will, over the order of the mind. Reason does not get you faith (as Pascal cleverly demonstrated with the whole wager thing). Faith (of whatever sort) brings with it its own reason. And, I would argue, without eradicating the fruits of other reasons. Such faith tends to have a knack for 'reading between the lines' and extracting messages, suited to the times, even from old texts.
It's why you can have very progressive Christian people, very progressive Jewish people, finding in the Bible a more progressive Jesus or Jahweh than is 'literally' described by the accounts we have. Moreover, for them, the spiritual dimension of it all isn't just 'in' the text, it's in their *present* relationship with J/J. Now, the difficult thing, is that this means that there is something more complicated than just tradition going on here, more than just 'respecting the past.'
I'll never forget the story a teacher told me about his friend who, while near death during the Vietnam War, felt a great big Nothing and, when he recovered, became a full-on no-self Zen practitioner. I like it because it reminds me that not everyone has the same conversion experience, that if you have it, well, there is no point trying to shoe-horn it into a path that just won't honor it.
I think in most cases these days, there is probably some fairly well-established path to accommodate most any conversion, what with the internet and all, but I like to remind myself, too, of a time when this wasn't the case, when someone could only go heretic or prophet to do that, most people probably doing neither and instead just suffering.
And, too, I like to remind myself of those who can't participate in the community of their heart openly because of social violence (be that Christianity, Islam, Wicca, Santeria, Buddhism, Judaism, what have you). That's a sort of cruelty that is darn near intolerable.
I think what bothers me more than anything else is how difficult it is for so many to make that distinction, to distinguish between respecting their own conversion and respecting another's conversion, as if one must be 'the *one* and *only* true conversion.'
(*sigh* didn't mean to get carried away, yet still just a little too in love with my own fevered products to delete them...time to go grab some lunch and stop talking to nobody;)
