There are certain problems in the Christian faith that have confused me – I should have said ‘that I have pondered’ to sound smarter, but confused I have been – the first brought up again by Cal in the comment section of the last blog. In this, he says that empires come and go, just like lives, and that we should not worry about that. It is the way of the universe. This is so, although it only works for the individual in the abstract. Personal experience is another matter. For instance, at the fall of the Byzantine Empire @ 1450, the Ottoman Turks finally broke through the ancient walls of Constantinople with primitive canons. The people of the city flocked to the Hagia Sophia, considered then to be the greatest Christian cathedral in the world, in hopes of being saved by the Virgen, to whom the cathedral was dedicated. As it happened, the Janissaries, the SS shock troops of the Turks, broke in, killed all the men and then raped the women and girls and boys on upturned tables and the altar itself. This is the true meaning of the end of empires and countries and civilizations. In retrospect it might seem natural and ho-hum, but to those in the collapsing nations, it is anything but.
That, however, is not directly the problem. The problem, as I have put in the essay, “Nightmares” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars, is how, in a world wrought by God, such evils could exist. I wrote there that I have had epiphanies where I could see the whole of God’s creation as good, even though I could clearly see much that was bad when taken in part. So, societies collapse, people die, people kill and rape and are killed and raped, but all is good under the great dome of Heaven. This has been looked at in depth by St Augustine, who also had strong epiphanies of the goodness of creation, and who also noticed with great clarity all the evils under the sun. To this he wrote that, first, it was Man’s original sin that started evil, and second, that even so, in total, the universe was perfect and perfectly good.
Beyond that, says Augustine, we are ultimately subject not to the thoughts of Man, but to the thoughts of God. We may intuit those thoughts, as we do in our epiphanies, but we cannot re-interpret them within the field of normal human logic. Such can only be understood with the enlightenment of spirit.
Yes, this is a disappointing conclusion, giving us little in our ordinary lives. It is as if we were to join the Hari Krishna movement only to find that eternal bliss is still nearly impossible to obtain, in both this life and the next, with or without saffron robes.
Which brings up the second major problem, or inscrutability, of Christianity.
In my other published work, Dream Weaver, in the chapter “Spirit in the Sky,” I write about the epiphany of a Jesus Freak, a man who gave me a ride from Winslow, Arizona, to the exit south of San Angelo, Texas. He had been a California hippie-surfer when he saw the light. He explains in pretty vivid detail – that is, still vivid in my own memory – the love and beauty he experienced of the Virgin and her son, the Christ. It is a beautiful story, but when the ride was over and I was unloading my pack to hitch the highway again, he gave me a verse from Acts of the New Testament which reads: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” This has the same meaning as the chapter and verse often presented to us on signs at football games: Chapter 14, Verse 6 (in the St Joseph Catholic Bible). As spoken by Jesus, it goes as follows: “I am the way and the truth and the life, says the lord; no one comes to the Father except through the son.” Both clearly say that we can go to heaven only through Christ. I end the chapter in disappointment and confusion. Is this true? Is it only Christians who have the answer in all this great world? And yet, it could not be possible that Jesus lied. Could there be a hidden message in this?
It is probable that these quotes were whipped up by the authors in the zeal that was present after they had witnessed, or knew people who had witnessed, the risen Christ after the crucifixion. Yet the Catholic Church and all the brilliant theologians attached to it have concurred that what Jesus reportedly said is absolutely true at face value. What else, they tell us, could it mean but what these quotes clearly say?
In Dream Weaver I conjectured that Jesus might have come to many humans as the savior in different time periods within the understanding of their own religions – that is, as the Buddha or Lao Tzu or whoever. This is considered the “heresy of syncretism” in the Catholic Church. This might simply be an expression of jealousy for its version of the truth. I cannot answer that. But what I can say is that it is more than likely that we, as the limited and myopic beings that we are, could not confront the “face of God,” or the ultimate of the universe, without burning up, just like the Nazi on “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” It would be like jumping from first grade math lessons to a graduate class on quantum physics at MIT, times a billion. This concept is shared by many religions, after all. For Buddhists and Hindus, reaching the ultimate is nearly impossible, taking an eternity of rebirths, if not more (through other cycles in different universes). For less complex societies, the extraordinarily brave man might make it through now and then (I am less sure about women), but perhaps the less-civilized mind is clearer on such things. Even so, it is a tough, tough thing to do.
Not so much with Christ. The very- difficult- to- grasp idea is that God Himself suffered and died for our stupidities and cruelties, as only God could cover so much, so that we could be brought before God as imperfect as we are, face to face. The Christian, then, has a portion of God himself to bring him to Himself, overcoming the obstacles of imperfection. All it takes is faith, which is why it is said that faith moves mountains. Trouble is, it takes great faith, but still something that is apparently within reach of the ordinary person, especially in the final moments of life.
So we might say that for the great majority of people, we can join ultimate reality with its timeless eternal life only with the aid of God, which has come to us in the form of Christ. The Catholic Church has solved the problem concerning those ignorant of Christ by allowing them time immediately after death to confront Christ and accept or reject Him. So, there we have it: the problem of the world’s salvation solved.
But is it? If the world of humans lasts another 20,000 years, will the Christ of the Abrahamic religion still be known? Or will it dissolve into the past and merge with some new form more compatible with the future society (ies) of the world? That is, if we can only come to God through Christ, will that opportunity end if Christianity, like other religions from the distant past, disappear? Or will it resist everything else we know about human thought and continue for all time in its essential form? Or will the world of Man simply end before a time without knowledge of Christ could come?
As with the problem of good and evil under the rule of Divine Mercy, I cannot pretend to know the answer. My social science side says to simply shrug off the claims of Christianity, but my spiritual side answers back, telling me that the ideas of Man are crude and limited. All things are possible with faith, but need we suspend what seems so logical – that Christianity is just another religion?
Personally, for this, I have to shrug off our crude logic and accept what glimpses of a greater reality have given me. It is not easy to do, to depend on this divine aid, but neither is living through an eternity of lives. There is a greater logic, as St Augustine has said, and it is as far from us as quantum physics is to a first grader. This is true.
But I am still left wanting. Only Jesus? Evil in a perfectly good world? It is why Dream Weaver ended without a snappy, sale-able ending. I did not learn the great secrets of the universe through my adventures. Even as the hitching journey – the journey of my youth – has long been over, my questioning is not. So it is for nearly all of us. It seems, then, that we are doomed to seeing only in a glass darkly, until we are unbound from the world of time and space.
There are certain problems in the Christian faith that have confused me – I should have said ‘that I have pondered’ to sound smarter, but confused I have been – the first brought up again by Cal in the comment section of the last blog. In this, he says that empires come and go, just like lives, and that we should not worry about that. It is the way of the universe. This is so, although it only works for the individual in the abstract. Personal experience is another matter. For instance, at the fall of the Byzantine Empire @ 1450, the Ottoman Turks finally broke through the ancient walls of Constantinople with primitive canons. The people of the city flocked to the Hagia Sophia, considered then to be the greatest Christian cathedral in the world, in hopes of being saved by the Virgen, to whom the cathedral was dedicated. As it happened, the Janissaries, the SS shock troops of the Turks, broke in, killed all the men and then raped the women and girls and boys on upturned tables and the altar itself. This is the true meaning of the end of empires and countries and civilizations. In retrospect it might seem natural and ho-hum, but to those in the collapsing nations, it is anything but.
That, however, is not directly the problem. The problem, as I have put in the essay, “Nightmares” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars, is how, in a world wrought by God, such evils could exist. I wrote there that I have had epiphanies where I could see the whole of God’s creation as good, even though I could clearly see much that was bad when taken in part. So, societies collapse, people die, people kill and rape and are killed and raped, but all is good under the great dome of Heaven. This has been looked at in depth by St Augustine, who also had strong epiphanies of the goodness of creation, and who also noticed with great clarity all the evils under the sun. To this he wrote that, first, it was Man’s original sin that started evil, and second, that even so, in total, the universe was perfect and perfectly good.
Beyond that, says Augustine, we are ultimately subject not to the thoughts of Man, but to the thoughts of God. We may intuit those thoughts, as we do in our epiphanies, but we cannot re-interpret them within the field of normal human logic. Such can only be understood with the enlightenment of spirit.
Yes, this is a disappointing conclusion, giving us little in our ordinary lives. It is as if we were to join the Hari Krishna movement only to find that eternal bliss is still nearly impossible to obtain, in both this life and the next, with or without saffron robes.
Which brings up the second major problem, or inscrutability, of Christianity.
In my other published work, Dream Weaver, in the chapter “Spirit in the Sky,” I write about the epiphany of a Jesus Freak, a man who gave me a ride from Winslow, Arizona, to the exit south of San Angelo, Texas. He had been a California hippie-surfer when he saw the light. He explains in pretty vivid detail – that is, still vivid in my own memory – the love and beauty he experienced of the Virgin and her son, the Christ. It is a beautiful story, but when the ride was over and I was unloading my pack to hitch the highway again, he gave me a verse from Acts of the New Testament which reads: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” This has the same meaning as the chapter and verse often presented to us on signs at football games: Chapter 14, Verse 6 (in the St Joseph Catholic Bible). As spoken by Jesus, it goes as follows: “I am the way and the truth and the life, says the lord; no one comes to the Father except through the son.” Both clearly say that we can go to heaven only through Christ. I end the chapter in disappointment and confusion. Is this true? Is it only Christians who have the answer in all this great world? And yet, it could not be possible that Jesus lied. Could there be a hidden message in this?
It is probable that these quotes were whipped up by the authors in the zeal that was present after they had witnessed, or knew people who had witnessed, the risen Christ after the crucifixion. Yet the Catholic Church and all the brilliant theologians attached to it have concurred that what Jesus reportedly said is absolutely true at face value. What else, they tell us, could it mean but what these quotes clearly say?
In Dream Weaver I conjectured that Jesus might have come to many humans as the savior in different time periods within the understanding of their own religions – that is, as the Buddha or Lao Tzu or whoever. This is considered the “heresy of syncretism” in the Catholic Church. This might simply be an expression of jealousy for its version of the truth. I cannot answer that. But what I can say is that it is more than likely that we, as the limited and myopic beings that we are, could not confront the “face of God,” or the ultimate of the universe, without burning up, just like the Nazi on “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” It would be like jumping from first grade math lessons to a graduate class on quantum physics at MIT, times a billion. This concept is shared by many religions, after all. For Buddhists and Hindus, reaching the ultimate is nearly impossible, taking an eternity of rebirths, if not more (through other cycles in different universes). For less complex societies, the extraordinarily brave man might make it through now and then (I am less sure about women), but perhaps the less-civilized mind is clearer on such things. Even so, it is a tough, tough thing to do.
Not so much with Christ. The very- difficult- to- grasp idea is that God Himself suffered and died for our stupidities and cruelties, as only God could cover so much, so that we could be brought before God as imperfect as we are, face to face. The Christian, then, has a portion of God himself to bring him to Himself, overcoming the obstacles of imperfection. All it takes is faith, which is why it is said that faith moves mountains. Trouble is, it takes great faith, but still something that is apparently within reach of the ordinary person, especially in the final moments of life.
So we might say that for the great majority of people, we can join ultimate reality with its timeless eternal life only with the aid of God, which has come to us in the form of Christ. The Catholic Church has solved the problem concerning those ignorant of Christ by allowing them time immediately after death to confront Christ and accept or reject Him. So, there we have it: the problem of the world’s salvation solved.
But is it? If the world of humans lasts another 20,000 years, will the Christ of the Abrahamic religion still be known? Or will it dissolve into the past and merge with some new form more compatible with the future society (ies) of the world? That is, if we can only come to God through Christ, will that opportunity end if Christianity, like other religions from the distant past, disappear? Or will it resist everything else we know about human thought and continue for all time in its essential form? Or will the world of Man simply end before a time without knowledge of Christ could come?
As with the problem of good and evil under the rule of Divine Mercy, I cannot pretend to know the answer. My social science side says to simply shrug off the claims of Christianity, but my spiritual side answers back, telling me that the ideas of Man are crude and limited. All things are possible with faith, but need we suspend what seems so logical – that Christianity is just another religion?
Personally, for this, I have to shrug off our crude logic and accept what glimpses of a greater reality have given me. It is not easy to do, to depend on this divine aid, but neither is living through an eternity of lives. There is a greater logic, as St Augustine has said, and it is as far from us as quantum physics is to a first grader. This is true.
But I am still left wanting. Only Jesus? Evil in a perfectly good world? It is why Dream Weaver ended without a snappy, sale-able ending. I did not learn the great secrets of the universe through my adventures. Even as the hitching journey – the journey of my youth – has long been over, my questioning is not. So it is for nearly all of us. It seems, then, that we are doomed to seeing only in a glass darkly, until we are unbound from the world of time and space.
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