Awakening From Another Spiritual Stupor

It all seems too ridiculous...the concept of God and the afterlife, the need for a savior and the master plan. I can see it all unfolding before me, its true genealogy revealing its most humble beginnings in the newly awakened minds of our earliest ancestors. When first able to put into words the reality of death, instead of embracing the realization that they were just like the flower and the deer, they chose to elevate themselves above the rest of the natural world. They told stories of another life for their forebearers to reinforce their importance to their children. They honored their dead with gifts and offerings that would help sustain them in this next life. But some began to question, how can the revered rest with the unworthy; the very question that was echoed by David in the Psalms. It was then that we see the formation of a place for the righteous and a place for the wicked--a Heaven and a Hell. But this, too, needed to be clarified, explained to the illiterate masses. Thus, a code was established, abide by it, they were told, and you will live, break it and you too will be broken. But the code was hard, costly and unbearable, so there came a Savior who promised to pay the debt of sin that had been levied against them.

All major religions follow a similar course, the fallen condition, the code to completion and the hope to come--that is what makes them religions, whether the goal is enlightenment, self-fulfillment, Valhalla or Heaven. They all promise a way out. The reality of this pluralism in the world always sours the taste of Christianity for me. Often, when I awake from the spiritual stupor that descends on me, I am appalled to find that I would even consider this collection of fables to be the very keys that unlock the Real.

And yet, this cynical position, though intellectually safe from ridicule, is itself absurd. True, pluralism seems to reject out of hand any claim to absolute truth but what does the proliferation of religion reveal about the human condition. Of course I am not the first one to suggest that therein lies one nucleus, a kernel of the Real, that all the other particular religious orbit around. I never have any original thoughts, any feelings of creativity and genius are merely the function of my profound ignorance.

Despite the feelings expressed in this post, a line from Nouwen made tears well up in my eyes when I read it. He wrote, "This is a sincere desire," speaking of the search for meaning, "don't look on it as an expression of your own neediness or as a symptom of your own neurosis." I had expressed a very similar thought to Rev. Linda in our last meeting. I don't know why that it strikes me as so unique when another person writes what is written on my heart. We are all the same, why do I feel as if I am the only one? But it is in the commonality of conscious experience, like the ubiquity of religion, that a transcendent truth is hidden, but what it is or who it points to remains a mystery to me.