Question Authority — Pay the Price
(Excerpt from my Memoir “Out of Your Head — Into Your Heart”)
I inherited my views about God from my church and family. Years later I came to see that these dogmas were seldom mine. It was only in my middle years that I questioned these religious prescriptions.
What I came to realize is that
“If you raise hell you must be prepared to burn”
My family measured their devotion to Christianity by the number of times they attended church services. That was twice on Sunday, once on Wednesday for the prayer meeting, and for myself, Friday night for the youth group. Adherence to this rhythm was up there with obedience to the Ten Commandments.
One Sunday morning at church I was in the throes of one of my latest adolescent crushes. Just before the 11am service started I became deeply engrossed in a conversation with a young woman. Before we knew it an hour or so had passed. We could hear the muffled sound of hymns being sung, the Bible being read, and the pastor droning on and on in his sermon. We were so wrapped up in each other that we ‘forgot’ about our duty to sit on the hard pews and endure the service.
At the conclusion of the meeting my mother bustled out of the church red faced and riddled with anxiety. She confronted me with one of those “wait till your father gets home” warnings.
After we arrived home I was sent to my room to await my fate at the hands of my father. He ordered me to take down my trousers and bend over the bed. I awaited my familiar plight as he went into the orchard and cut a branch from the peach tree. It was a long and flexible instrument that would inflict maximum pain. During the six splats on my buttocks I refused to give him the satisfaction of my tears. The beating left me with blue to black bruises for three weeks.
The long-term effect was what we psychologists call “father and church” issues.
“Question Authority” was not just a slogan on a 1960’s T-shirt. It’s Christian version was preceded by an emphatic “don’t’. That day in my late adolescence I defied the authority of my religion and family. I was just getting started.
It was only in my middle years that I consciously began to challenge certain Tribal beliefs and behavioral norms.
This led to a search for a deeper truth.
During this journey, I found myself moving away from a religion of fear and exclusion toward one of hope and healing.
But this was not an easy passage. It unfolded as an ongoing crisis that continued for many years. Up to the moment when I went off my religious rails, I supposed that I had the best of lives. I thought I had a solid marriage. I had a family — two children and a successful career as pastor and later on as a seminary professor. I also had a fully funded scholarship in a Ph.D. program in psychology.
I was living the script handed to me by others.
As I took my first steps down a different path, moving away from “I know for sure” toward “I don’t know, and that’s okay,” my whole life collapsed.
I was shamed, judged, rejected, and banned. I lost my livelihood, and, early on during that transition, my self-respect. I struggled in ways I had never imagined before because, while my life had been very good on the surface, I was living a false life, an ego-driven life. It seemed comfortable, but even the illusion of comfort was based on a conditional ‘love’ and conditional acceptance.
As long as I conformed to the Tribe’s prescriptions of belief and behavior, I received their ‘love’, support, and client referrals. I built my life on a house of cards.
What I didn’t know then and am learning today is that deep within the heart resides the source of love. And that love seeps through the cracks of an achy-breaky heart. It was only after my life was in ruins that I got a hint of deeper truths about oneness and love. I began to see me in you and you in me. I was not alone in that struggle to make God’s love real.
That struggle is reflected in the groans of millions who have lived under religions that hurt too much — the gay man who has been ordered by his church to “convert” to a heterosexual orientation; the abused woman who was counseled by her minister to submit to her controlling husband; the despair a woman of color feels because she has been labeled “other” all her life; the plight of the man on his deathbed who is told that healing did not occur because his faith was too shallow.
I started to wonder whether there’s a typical spiritual trajectory for people who have turned away from one of the many brands of religious orthodoxy.
Do we share a similar spiritual journey though we may have begun at a different starting point? True, we all live in broken human systems. And yes, we create stories about others and ourselves out of our small-minded egos.
But at the same time, we all have the potential toward a joyful spirituality. Could there possibly be a Road Map to Spiritual Healing for those who have been damaged by their religion?
For me, the doubt that worked its way into my life and beliefs was the prelude to my getting out of my head and into my heart, where, I have learned, true spirituality begins. All my intellectualizing about the world of Spirit left my head spinning and my heart was drooping when I finally faced the truth: We can never crack the Divinity nut with our brains.
But the heart is a different thing altogether. It’s not just the part of our anatomy that pumps blood. Nor is it just the seat of our emotions. Rather, it’s a metaphor for a wide variety of receptors that receive messages from within us as well as beyond our skin.
Realizing this, I thought perhaps I had identified the first step on the Road Map to recovering from a toxic religious indoctrination or experience:
Shifting from belief to faith.
If belief is blindly accepting what we are told about the Divine and relies mainly on rational knowing, then faith, it seems to me, is how we experience Presence directly through the seat of our soul or inner consciousness. I call this shift away from belief and into faith “seeing God with the eye of the heart.”
What we set our hearts on, in this endeavor, is Divine Presence. Presence is found within all peoples and all religions. Despite what I was taught, Christianity does not have the corner of the market on that divine spark. Everyone has this capacity. Everyone has heart.
We are all capable of connecting to what Rabbi Rachel Timoner identifies as “the one unifying presence that connects all life.”
Maybe a better question would be