Flashback: Experiences of Mystery and Wonder

While I'm involved in another project, I am re-posting some of my favorite essays. A version of the following essay appeared in a series of essays in May of 2010.

“I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.”

                      – Harry Emerson Fosdick

A Childhood Encounter

It was not my first experience of mystery, but it makes for a good story. I was eight years old and it was a breezy summer evening. We lived in the country and our closest neighbor owned a horse pasture that lay between our house and his. On this particular evening, I happened to be out in the back yard as dusk was slowly moving to twilight. I looked down below our yard to where our neighbor's pasture ran adjacent to the woods. It was there that I saw the strangest sight. It resembled a white sheet floating in the air and dancing about in the lower corner of the pasture. I was astounded and perplexed. I had heard ghost stories and had seen them portrayed on TV, and I began to wonder if I might actually be seeing a ghost. The sight must have been two or three hundred feet away, so I slowly walked down toward the pasture fence to get a better view.

My heart was pounding, I was breathing deeply, my eyes were unblinking and fixed upon the mysterious object that floated, danced, and changed shape as it moved about in sometimes a circular motion, sometimes an erratic fashion. I felt both fear and fascination as I continued to creep in for a closer look. As I got closer, I heard snorting and footsteps – it was definitely alive. How much closer should I get? Should I bolt and run back to the house? At that critical moment my eyes detected what I had not been able to see further back in the dim twilight. I saw the shape of a brown Shetland pony who had white shoulders and a white back. Our neighbor was temporarily keeping a friend's pony in his pasture. There was a brief moment there when fear and laughter co-mingled. Suddenly the movement, the snorting and the hoof beats all made sense as I realized that from my initial distance I had only been able to see the white markings on the pony.

I ran back to the house in excitement. I had to tell someone what I had just experienced. The first person I saw was my older brother who was watching TV.         

"Richard!" I said, "You gotta hear this – I thought I saw a ghost!" I then began recounting my twilight adventure. My brother, who was four years older than I (in fact, he is still four years older than I am) interrupted my story.

"Did you say you walked down to see it?" he asked.

"Yes!" I answered.

"You didn't think it was a ghost or you would have run away."

"But I did think so at first," I countered.

"No," he said, "you would have run."

*  *  *

Seventeen years later I was in seminary in California. In a Philosophy of Religion class I was reading Rudolf Otto's classic work, Das Heilige. Actually, I was reading the English translation, The Idea of the Holy. Rudolf Otto was writing about encountering mystery and wonder in the context of religious experience. He didn't like to use the word holy because of certain baggage that came along with the word. Instead, he coined the term, numinous to refer to the experience of mystery, and he used the term, mysterium tremendum to refer to the divine mystery itself. He wanted to get back to a more basic primal concept of religious encounter.

At one point Mr. Otto said that when one encounters the vast and indescribable mysterium tremendum one has the feeling of fear and the urge to run, but at the same time one is attracted to the mystery. When I read that, I wanted to go back to my brother and show him, "You see! Here's a German theologian who says you can experience fear and attraction simultaneously – that’s why I didn't run but went to get a closer look, even when I thought it might be a ghost." But I didn't tell him that because he's four years older than I am. Besides, I doubt if my brother even remembers the incident.  

Looking back on that encounter long ago, I realize that all I need to know about experiencing mystery and wonder I had already learned by eight years of age:

      1. I had other-worldly terminology to ascribe to the experience.

      2. I knew the simultaneous feelings of fear and attraction.

      3. I learned that it is difficult to convey to others the impact of a subjective

           experience.

      4. There will be people who will discount one's experience of mystery.

      5. I learned that truth does not diminish the impact of a subjective experience

          of mystery.

Walking in Mystery

The very existence of life is grounds for mystery and wonder to me. The fact that life arose on this planet and has evolved in such variety and with such tenacity that every square inch of the planet – land, water, and air – is occupied by some life-form. That in itself is a wondrous phenomenon. Even more mysterious and wondrous is the fact that you and I are present to talk about it. We are representative of the arrival of human consciousness. With human awareness, Life became capable of observing and reflecting upon, as well as participating in creation. With over 7 billion people in the world it is safe to say that not a single sunrise or sunset goes unobserved, and on an increasing basis, hardly a sparrow goes unnoticed.

Why do we have those direct experiences of mystery and wonder? We walk in mystery and wonder every day. For practical reasons, perhaps, it is easy to ignore the wonder or to take the mystery for granted. Then on occasion the curtain is torn for a brief moment and we experience the impact of the vast mystery and wonder that is around us, beneath us and within us.

However and for whatever reason we experience mystery, it seems to be human nature to celebrate it. This is why some television audiences have been enthralled to hear the now familiar French horns followed by the voice-over narration, "Space...the final frontier..." It is why many flock to see the latest horror flick on the big screen. For others it is the eager discussion of UFO's or lost civilizations. Still others prefer the symphony, or a spiritual commitment as a means of celebrating mystery.                                     

My own experiences of mystery and wonder led me first to poetry then to theology, then back to poetry. I think poetry is a more primary response. Theology, like philosophy and psychology are secondary responses in that they require categories, definitions, rules and analyses. Music and dance may give us an even more primary response since they can be done without words.

Some would say that the best response to mystery and wonder is a theological one. Others prefer to give psychological and sociological interpretations to experiences of mystery. Carl Jung was one who saw the psychological and religious implications of mystery and greatly elucidated psychological concepts to promote personal and spiritual growth.

There are a thousand and one ways to celebrate the mystery and wonder about us. We humans are naturally adept at making meaning out of our lives, and doing it in a palatable manner. At some point, or at some level there is the realization that all of our activities and celebrations only hint at the Great Mystery that is beyond words, beyond deeds, even beyond silence, but somehow underlies existence itself.

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Photo by Michael J. Bennett
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Rationalizing Old Testament Texts of Terror

 or How We Paint Ourselves into a Difficult Corner

(the alternative would be to unbind ourselves from past misconceptions)

From William Blake's Book of Job

When I went to college, Religion was one of my majors (English Lit was my other major – English Lit actually redeemed my education by showing me how to see the importance of the stories we tell). My professors in the Religion Department at Samford University were the hallmark of scholarship and integrity. Some of my classmates were more conservative and were often quite troubled by the scholarship of our instructors. Many of their notions of biblical infallibility and inerrancy were challenged. For my part, I quickly determined that the Christian Fundamentalists who had no problem believing that every word in the Bible was absolutely and unquestionably true had obviously not read much of it. If the texts are actually read, even the most devout will have cause to wonder about why some passages are even included in the Holy Writ.

The most obvious problem passages in the Bible are those Old Testament passages instructing the people of Israel to slaughter every inhabitant of the villages they came upon in their conquest of Canaan. They were instructed to have no mercy, to wipe out every man, woman and child.

Many Interpretations

Roger Olson is a theologian who is a professor of Theology at George W. Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University. If you are interested in theology, I can highly recommend his blog, My Evangelical Arminian Theological Musings. Dr. Olson is a very disciplined scholar with an authentic spiritual background. His topics often cover things of interest to the evangelical community, but he also offers many helpful discussions in theology and Christian history, all very accessible but always grounded in honest scholarship.

This week Dr. Olson did a blog post titled, “Every Known Theistic Approach to Old Testament ‘Texts of Terror’.” In his usual style, he listed all the classical approaches that various Christian scholars have taken to try to explain those Old Testament passages that describe a war god promoting genocidal tactics. He provides us with a helpful and succinct list of theological approaches and points out the problems with each.

Of the various approaches that Olson enumerates, I found myself most closely in line with the progressive revelation interpretation and the liberal interpretation:

Progressive revelation interpretation: “Inspiration” does not mean dictation or that every story in the Bible is to be taken at “face value.” God accommodated revelation to the people’s ability to understand him and people came to understand God’s revelation more clearly over time. As God incarnate, Jesus is the clearest revelation of God’s character and will. At times God’s people misunderstood his command and recorded their own beliefs about God and his commands as revelation from God. God’s revelation of his own character and will becomes clearer throughout Scripture with the later (clearer) parts relativizing the earlier (less clear) parts.

*Problems: Requires a very flexible view of divine inspiration of Scripture (and rejection of inerrancy if not infallibility). Is also subject to accusations of implicit Marcionism.

Liberal interpretation: Portions of the Old Testament (and perhaps also of the New) are culturally conditioned such that they cannot be believed by modern people. The touchstone of biblical interpretation is the modern worldview and modern ethical sensibilities. (In other words, yes, the people of God did slaughter men, women, and children, but God did not command it.)

*Problem: Sets up a temporal and conditioned cultural norm (“modern”) over Scripture itself and possibly even over Jesus himself. Leads to phenomena such as the “Jefferson Bible” (whether literally, physically or not).

As it turns out, of course, there are problems with any interpretation that has been given to these texts. Each problem generally has to do with the fact that a given interpretation either conflicts with our traditional view of God or challenges the authority of scripture.

The Problem is the Text

Mine was one of the many comments in response to Dr. Olson’s post. I stated that the primary “problem” with each interpretation of these texts of terror is that the texts exist. Perhaps none of us would be in danger of challenging the immutability of God or the infallibility of scripture if there were no such texts. As it is, we are faced with the realization that either we ourselves have more compassion and a higher ethic than the God who is portrayed here, or the guys writing things down just got it wrong.

Carl Jung wrote a fascinating book called Answer to Job. His contemporaries in the academic psychological field were embarrassed that Jung wrote such a book. One of the ideas he presents is that when Yahweh appeared to Job in the whirlwind with his “where were you when I formed the earth” speech, that Yahweh himself was startled with the realization that Job in his humanity was superior to him. Yahweh, as Jung “analyzes” it is not sure whether Job saw this, but at that point he realizes that he needs to become incarnate as a human if he is to be complete.

Unbinding Ourselves

Carl Jung writes not as a theologian, but rather brings his own psychological approach to questions of religion. One of the beauties of Carl Jung’s approach to theology and philosophy in Answer to Job is that he is not bound by the staid and dusty confines of the establishment. This is a justifiable approach, especially in dealing with Job. If you have read the book of Job, you may remember that the most unhelpful advice Job received was from his friends who uttered the staid traditional theology of the day.

If we are to be honest about our lives and about our faith, sometimes we must unbind ourselves from the religious package we have inherited. Tomorrow I will talk about how my life as an English major helped me to loose myself from some of the confines and inadequacies of a faith that was neatly packaged but not quite my own.

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My Notebook (and things worth writing down)

I have a small notebook (5" X 7") which I like to carry with me to lectures and meetings because of its convenient and unobtrusive size. Today I had an appointment to discuss a project so I grabbed my little notebook on the way out the door. I found myself waiting alone in a small waiting area prior to the meeting, so I decided to thumb through the notes I had taken in past meetings and lectures. Here are some highlights:

From Daniel Sulmasy on medical ethics:

Spirituality is not ethics – they are distinct disciplines, though intimately related. They are often conflated in discussions about spirituality. Ethics is not solely based on religion/spirituality. There is the philosophical concept of ethics, and ethics can also be founded upon reason.

In a secular/pluralistic environment, religions can “fit in” when talking about ethics (war and peace, justice, medical ethics). Spiritual concepts of healthcare cannot be supplanted by bioethics. Hospitals are not happy places – relief is often the best one can hope for. Suffering and shadows prevail. Ethics alone makes no sense of suffering.

From Martin Marty on what goes wrong in church:

The huddle – you know an important conversation is taking place, but all you can see are the behinds.

From Wayne Flynt on mega churches:

They are “country clubs for the sanctified;” “Wal-Marts for selling Jesus-lite.”
Many twenty-somethings are leaving church because they are more tolerant and environmentally conscious than their church.

From Bishop John Shelby Spong on God and the church:

How to envision God: (1) as the source of life calling us to live fully, (2) as the source of love calling us to love wastefully, (3) as being – calling us to be our authentic self.

The job of the church is to free human beings so they can be fully human – not to rescue you from your sins, but to empower you to be you.

*     *     *     *     *

Some days it is good to go back to catch up and reflect upon things we once found important enough to write down.

*

Amazing Grace: A Unitarian Perspective

A theological choice

You may have heard the joke that Unitarians are poor singers because they are always reading ahead to see if they agree with the next line.  A friend sent me a link from the Unitarian publication UU World that talks about one particular hymn that actually gives singers a couple of options. It’s the beloved hymn, “Amazing Grace.” It seems that rather than forcing worshippers to sing about amazing grace “that saved a wretch like me,” there is an asterisk to indicate that one may sing, “that saved a soul like me.” The article asks the question, do you feel wretched or soulful today? Is your theology one of confessing “your own wretchedness and even our common condition as a fallen, faulty species,” or do you affirm that you are “a nice, well-rounded, fully individuated, sin-free, guilt-free humanist soul?”

The author of the brief article, Virginia Stafford, makes this point about Unitarians: “We sing our song in different keys and cadences. We are on our own to make a faith out of nothing, which is to say, out of everything we have. That is daunting, lonely work, demanding and relentless work, the work of a lifetime, and I suspect it is the very scope of it that keeps our tiny movement small. Not everyone wants to stop singing in the middle of the song and consider once again and all alone the nature of the human soul and God, infinity within and infinity without.”

Are you a wretch or a soul?

There were a few comments to the online article. I had to add my perspective that we sit in our niceties of society and discuss the polarities or "wretch" or "soul." We should not lose sight of the fact that this beloved hymn was written by English evangelical John Newton, who had once been a slave trader. Little wonder that he chose the word "wretch" to describe his former life. If we accept our own humanity, we must accept that we ourselves possess all the potential goodness and evil that exists within the human spectrum.

My friend who shared the article with me later said that he was listening to a recording of the famous African American singer, the late Paul Robeson, singing “Amazing Grace.” He found it interesting to note that Mr. Robeson chose to sing “a soul like me.” Here again, I think I can understand why the singer made that choice. Perhaps both perspectives can be true on any given day. Perhaps both are simultaneously true on any given day. How do you feel today?

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"Somebody was wrong, and it wasn’t Jesus"

Wayne Flynt
Samford University Photo

I went back to my alma mater last Saturday to hear Wayne Flynt give a talk at the Samford University Library as part of the Homecoming events. He talked about what life was like when he graduated with the class of 1961. He then read an excerpt from his new memoir, Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives. The reading he chose related his experience of being challenged and seeing broader possibilities as he went from a provincial homogenous community to experience higher education and as he met people on his college campus from other parts of the world and other walks of life. I was especially taken by one quote in particular:

“It was not my parents, peers, school, or church that began to unshackle me from the chains of racism. It was the Bible. I was only a teenager in high school when the first tensions appeared between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of John Patterson and George Wallace. Somebody was wrong. And it wasn’t Jesus.”

The reason I like that quote is that it resonates very much with my own experience. When I went to Samford University in the mid 1970s, I decided on a double major in English and Religion. One of my friends said at the time, “Not only will you have religion, you will be able to talk about it.” There may have been some truth to that. There has also been a lot of truth in Garrison Keillor’s remarks about English majors on his radio program, A Prairie Home Companion – which is why I ended up making a living as a registered nurse so I could continue to enjoy the fields of English and Religion.

My experience in the two departments became very enlightening and even liberating. The professors in the Religion Department were not the fundamentalist strand of the Baptist faith. "They all," as Wayne Flynt recalls, “held to the neo-orthodox theology as espoused by Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr; they were all theistic evolutionists; none believed in the plenary inspiration of scripture [i.e. inerrant and infallible texts directly dictated by God]. Those Baptists in 1958 were more liberal than half the country is today.” I indeed found that my professors were all caring people who wanted each student to really evaluate the concepts of life and faith in order to understand how it all works in the real world.  So many of us young Baptists had come to college having been steeped in folk religion, and this was our first opportunity to explore the faith more fully.

One particular professor, Karen Joines, was constantly being vilified by certain conservative students as a liberal bent on destroying faith. I found Karen Joines to be quite poetic as well as thought provoking. It occurred to me, since I was studying in both departments, that if Dr. Joines said the same things in the English Department that he was saying in the Religion Department, he would be hailed as a defender of the faith!  My love of literature helped me to see my studies in theology from a different perspective, and I suppose allowed me to be more open to new ideas than some of my conservative colleagues.

For me, it took most of my college career to really get to the point of being able to think through the concepts I was being exposed to (which is why I also believe in life-long learning – so many of us aren’t really at the stage to gain the most from our education while we are in our late teens and early twenties). By the time I finished college, I decided to go on to seminary. It was while I was at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California, that I saw a need to truly change my way of thinking.  Like Wayne Flynt during his high school and college days, I was reading the Bible, which I was conditioned to believe as the truth, and seeing a radical contradiction between the words of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets vs. the ethic of my Southern Christian culture.

The ironic thing was that Golden Gate Seminary, even though it was located in California, was more conservative than Samford University back in Alabama. The more I read, however, and the more I saw of society, the more I leaned toward a more liberal take on things. It is certainly possible to be just as fanatical and polemic as a liberal as are certain conservative fundamentalists. The important thing, rather, is to be open to learning. Openness to learning, openness to hearing another point of view, may lead to a conclusion seen as conservative by some. It may lead to a more liberal view. It is possible to be liberal in some things while being conservative in others.  Authenticity is the key.

My personal motto has become, “Honor Wisdom wherever you find it, welcome Beauty whenever it arrives, follow Truth wherever it leads.” I can thank caring instructors who had unswerving integrity for setting me on that path. I can also thank Wayne Flynt for reminding me of my great blessing in his talk last Saturday.

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Responding to the Mystery

(Part 7 in the series, Experiences of Mystery and Wonder)

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My own experiences of mystery and wonder led me first to poetry then to theology, and later back to poetry. I think poetry is a more primary response. Theology, like philosophy and psychology are secondary responses in that they require categories, definitions, rules, and analyses. Music may be even a more primary response to mystery and wonder than poetry since music can be done without words.

There are those who say that the best response to mystery and wonder is a theological one. Others prefer to give psychological and sociological interpretations to experiences of mystery. Carl Jung was one who saw the psychological and theological implications of mystery and greatly elucidated psychological aspects to promote personal and spiritual growth.

One of my experiences of wonder came in a dream. At the time I was not quite sure what to make of it, but as I examined it, it became clear that there were strong religious allusions, classical Jungian psychological elements, and a strong affirmation of the poetic response. This is how I recorded it in my journal on August 31, 1982:

I was awakened, or I awoke, in the wee hours of the morning
in the midst of a most enchanting dream. I do not use the
word "enchanting" quaintly. I cannot remember much of the
dream, but I remember its effect - it was fantastic and
enthralling. When I awoke, my first thought was to get
up and write down what I had just heard in my dream, But
when I realized that I couldn't actually remember the exact
words I instead lay back down and fell asleep - which is
perhaps unfortunate. However, I shall now attempt to relate
the effect and the impression of the dream. Here is what
I remember - it seems that I had given a book of my writings
to a young lady. The lady seems to have been a good friend
and in some way important to me, but I cannot ascribe an
actual person to the image in the dream. My memory of the
lady in the dream seems vivid, yet at the same time I cannot
recall her features enough to know if it was someone I
know in real life. At any rate, she was somehow special
to me in my dream. She began to read to me from my own
writings. As she read, the words were immediately familiar
- and pleasing - to me. It was as though I knew the words
before she read them, which was not surprising since I
had written them. However, as she read, the words took
on some different kind of beauty which completely enthralled
me. Then she came to a poetic passage - it had all seemed
poetic, but this passage had definite rhyme and meter -
now for the first time I heard my writing being sung. I
suppose it was still the same lady, but the beautiful
feminine voice was not coming from any particular direction,
and I was no longer looking at the one reading, but I was
caught up within the magical scene that was being described
in the song. The song was beautiful, almost a chant but
it was a song with definite rhyme and sounded quite
ethereal. By this time I was caught up in another world,
as it were, utterly astounded by the beauty of what I heard.
It was at this point that I awoke and realized that the
words I was hearing were not words that I had written -
not yet at least. I thought, "I must write down what I
remember of the song - it was so beautiful!" But I could
not remember completely even the last two lines that I
had heard. I do remember that some portentous event was
about to be related and the song, at the time I awoke,
was describing the night in which it took place. All I
remember is there was something unusual about the moon
- something, it seems, having to do with its intensity.
There was something about a ring around the moon - I think
- and something about the nature of the moon's light. I
remember visualizing a night-blue sky and a full moon and
an ocean below. The effect of the dream, primarily due
to the song - the words and the music and the vocal quality
- was one of sheer beauty, magic, and delight.
Unfortunately, it is also utterly ineffable.

The following are two attempts to speak poetically to the dream:



To Our Lady


My love bore twilight in her breast,
And starlight beauty shone
That bade me gladly leave the rest
To seek out flesh and bone.

My love bore sorrow in her eyes,
And joy within her heart
That made me fully realize
An ever missing part.

My love bore grief within her bones
And victory in her brow.
Her strength rolled back the massive stones
That held my heart till now.

8/83




To the Queen of Heaven

I do not know how long I slept
Before being awakened by the dream
And by the voice of the Lady.
I was on the ocean
or on a mountain
or between earth and sky.
Her voice was so lovely, I barely noticed
where I was.
I cannot tell which was more beautiful,
the sound of her voice
or the words that she spoke.

I knew her face
But could not call her name.
She spoke of a wonderful time to come,
A magnificent event.
The sound of her words vibrated my heart.
Then she sang,
And beauty was heightened all around.
I was caught up in wonder.
I slowly became aware
that I knew every word she would sing
Before she gave the words voice.

As I watched her singing
Somewhere between earth and sky
I realized that the words were my own.
It was my joy to hear her singing
the words in my heart;
Reading from the book that was to come.

I do not know how long I slept
Before being awakened
By the voice of the Lady.

3/92



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