FROM SECULARISM TO “NONE’S”:

Where Former Secularists Derive Their Spiritual understanding.[1]

INTRODUCTION: As I’ve mentioned before, I wrote a book a decade or three ago, entitled, I Once Spoke in Tongues. It was an attempt to come to terms with the Pentecostal heritage in which I was reared, but had left.

I knew without question that it would cause great concern for my father, and sure enough some time after it was published, Mother and Dad came up from Waco, Texas to Oklahoma City to visit my family and me. I waited with some apprehension at what I knew would be an emotional and painful experience for us both. In fact, I had written in that book about a similar conversation Dad broached after learning of a substantive theological dispute my brother and I had engaged in.

            Now though it was not a disagreement about what I had said about faith and belief to my brother, or he said that I said, or I said that he said. No, it was in a book, in black and white…about the bible…about speaking in tongues…about faith and beliefs.

            Surprisingly, the subject did not come up for the week or so they were there visiting – until they were ready to leave. Dad requested again that we go in the library where we could talk. We did and he closed the door. He disclosed that he had a copy of my book and had read it very carefully.

(As an aside, my father was not an “educated man” in the sense of a formal education. In fact, the last grade he attended in school was the 7^th, and that was only due to the rancher for whom he worked entrusting him to drive the wagon to take the rancher’s 12 year old daughter to the little one room school house closest to the ranch in New Mexico where Dad was working. Once there, the teacher allowed Dad to sit in the back row, where he listened and learned.

Then when he became a Christian and chose to enter the ministry, he went to his denomination’s fledgling college in Checotah, Oklahoma, where he was tutored and taught, mostly by his English teacher, whom he eventually wound up marrying. Mother’s tutoring continued and Dad spent a lifetime with his head in a book or the bible. Now he had retired from active ministry.)

And on this day in the library, he asked, “Wayne, do you know how much I love you and how proud I am of you?” I answered that I knew that, and how important it had always been. Then he asked, “Have you ever known me to lie to you or not to tell you the truth?” I told him I had never known him to lie and I believed that he had always told me the truth.

Then, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Well, son, if you know that I love you as much or more than anyone alive, and you know that I’ve never lied to you, why would you not believe what I’ve taught and preached all these years about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit?”

What was really happening is something that many of you have experienced, namely, life, time and experience combined to lead you away from the church of your heritage. It’s not always easy. In my case, I tried to answer honestly and yet with love and respect for one of the most important persons in my life. In fact, I’ve always cherished the memory of that occasion, because I knew the love that drove it.

As for the book, it’s had four different publishers, plus one in Spanish. And I discovered after loaning a copy to Midge Magstadt, that neither of us agreed with one of its major conclusions.

But Dad was right: I had changed and part of that was due to being significantly influenced by my first three years of graduate theological studies. And there were several professors who made a great deal of difference, especially, Dr. Schubert Ogden.

            One of his most important books was, Christ without myth, which I read and studied so much, that it was almost like a second bible. And the “Secularization Theory” under girding it was a distinct belief about the future. It was this:

In the coming years ahead, belief in God would gradually recede in the face of science and technology, which would then usher in a secular worldview. Religion would slowly fade into the background unless it was able to change and become relevant to “modern man.” And while there might be a small segment of society kicking and screaming, refusing to enter into the new reality, the world would pass them by.

A popular book of the time was, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. It asked this question: “How may a Christian, who is a secular person, understand the Gospel in a secular way?”

            As we all know, that perspective couldn’t have been more wrong. In the last 30 years, religion has prospered more than ever. The reason is this: What few if any of us knew back then was that the inclination towards spirituality in human beings is most probably biologically or genetically predetermined, rather than being the result of one’s experience or environment.

            Neurologist Dr. David Comings proposes that spirituality is genetically hardwired into a specific part of the brain. He states that spirituality is pleasurable, that it’s critical to the evolution and survival of human beings, and that it will never go away.

            A recent study by Dartmouth Medical School and the YWCA reported that, human beings are biologically primed to do three things:

1. seek inner moral direction

2. seek spiritual meaning, and

3. seek for a spiritual connection to the Transcendent.

The study concludes that this priming is an innate impulse that stems from our brain’s capacity for consciousness or self-awareness. Put another way, the awareness of our uniqueness as a species is the source of our drive to connect to the spiritual. This drive is a process present across cultures and time. It seems to be a biologically-based component of human development. It’s associated with spiritual practices such as contemplative prayer and meditation. It suggests again that our capacity and desire for spiritual experience are, to some degree, hard-wired.

So, while science and technology may have advanced in incredible ways, it has not been at the expense of religion, or of people’s desire and need for a spiritual perspective to life.

Anthropologists agree that as far back as we have evidence of human activity; there is a universal human capacity to wonder at the mysteries of birth, life, death, and the Cosmos. We have need to make sense of those mysteries, to find meaning to their power, to understand the strange circumstances in which we find ourselves, here on the edges of the Milky Way Galaxy.

That’s especially so when we read or listen to something like the new physics’ theory of the Universe. It proposes that our Universe is composed of vibrating strings of energy. In the way that the strings of a cello or violin can make a multitude of sounds, so quantum strings of energy have created a multitude of forms. Which means that according to this theory, the Universe is like one grand, awesome symphony orchestra, playing beautiful music.

Further, these same scientists tell us that there are at least eleven dimensions of reality that are a part of our Universe which are all happening simultaneously. We may be participating in any one or more of them at the same time. That means that at any given moment, we face an infinite number of possibilities and choices with our lives.

So there’s little question that in the last several decades, science and technology have advanced enormously. (A teacher told me that recently she had a student ask her to tell their class what it was like before there were cell phones – you know, back in the “olden days!”)

But what happened to religion in that same period of scientific and technological advance? According to a 2008 “Faith in Flux,” survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, many Americans change their religious affiliation at least once in their lives. And the largest-growing group out of what the report poetically describes as the “churn within American religion,” is the “unaffiliated” — those who check, “None of the above.” Or what someone has called, “NONE’s.”

The report suggests that some of the factors responsible for this are these: one, is generational shifts: The phases of life that we go through in modern society can cause us to reorient our religious identity; second, spiritual needs may not always be fulfilled in conventional religious settings.

Another cause is the huge delay in so many religious institutions to come to grips with social inequities in society.

n                         Many of you have read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. What we are not always as aware of is that he wrote it in response to eight mainstream clergymen opposed to his social activism. The mainstream church and the synagogue were a major obstacle to racial change in the South.

n                         Or what about the issue of women and church leadership. It is absolutely incomprehensible to me that Roman Catholics can refuse ordination and priesthood to women, and even punish those who push for it – ditto for the same recalcitrance by Southern Baptists.

n                         It is equally mind-boggling that any church could join in to oppress and ridicule lesbian women and gay men.

So no small wonder that a significant transition is taking place among a growing number of people who have deep spiritual longings, but are turned off by what they see in the institutional church. That’s a way of saying that for many NONEs, they recognize that faith by itself is incomplete. It must be willing to demonstrate that what it preaches is what it practices. It must be willing to enter into the arena of human and social need, to identify with the oppressed, to march against inhumanity, and to stand with those whom others shun.

There are many NONEs here among us. They/we may even be a majority. Much of what All Faiths tries to be is shaped by the same concerns articulated above. But what about the spiritual factor? How does it impact who we are?

APPLICATION.

1.     If we try to stay in tune with the Cosmos, then our faith and religious practices will always be in flux. What we believed yesterday was in response to yesterday’s world; today’s has changed.

a.      It’s like my golf game when I was playing regularly. I cannot tell you how many times I solved my swing problem, and left the course feeling the issue was resolved…only to come back the next time with a different problem. And my golfing buddies learned that if I had taken a golf lesson, they would automatically double every bet. Adapting to change would take time. But you know what: I watched Tiger Woods a couple of weeks ago, and he was missing shots too. Everyone does, because we are all a part of the  change constantly going on in our Universe.

Yesterday is passed, tomorrow is not yet come, but today – today is already here.

2.     Change in our life and world mean that our spiritual practices must change as well.

n     There was a time as a young Pentecostal Holiness minister when I read 10 chapters in the New Testament, every night…on my knees. It was one of my life’s richest spiritual periods.

n     There have been times when I spent every morning for at least 30 minutes in prostration as I listened to Gregorian chants.

n     There have been other times and other places and other practices: But the point is that sometimes it is necessary to change our practice to be in touch and in tune with the Cosmos as we are experiencing it at that moment.

CONCLUSION.

The great 14^th century Sufi Muslim Persian (now Iran) poet, Shabistara, wrote the following. (In the Garden of Mystery). Remember, this is from the 14^th century and it’s Islamic:

The Universe is human, and the human a Universe.

It can not be made any clearer than this.

Know that the world from end to end is a mirror.

In each atom blaze one hundred shining suns.

If you cleave the heart of a drop of water,

a hundred pure oceans will flow from it.

Every speck of dust, carefully examined,

reveals thousands of humans teeming within.

A gnat’s legs are like those of an elephant.

A drop of water, suggests the great River Nile.

From the core of a seed, spring a hundred harvests.

A whole world comes out of a seed of grass.

Spirit dwells in a mosquito’s wings,

heaven’s sphere in the point of its eye.

In the niche of the core of the heart,

the Lord of the Two worlds makes a home.

Hiding behind the veil of each and every atom,

Is the enlivening beauty of the Beloved’s face.

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. And blessed be.

MEDITATION

There is a beautiful Sufi chant that goes like this:

The ocean refuses no river, no river.

The open heart refuses no part of me, no part of you.

I am one with all that is, one with all;

All that is, is one with me, one with all.