1. A Brief Look At Christianity For The 21st Century:
A Personal Journey

by Dick Rauscher

Abstract

This article is an attempt to briefly explore the intellectual and spiritual path that I have been walking for the last sixty years. It is not meant to be the final word on my understanding of God, nor is it meant to represent THE truth. Like all of us, I continue to grow and awaken spiritually each day. This article simply reflects what currently makes sense to me as an ordained pastor of the Christian Church at this point in my spiritual journey as I struggle to spiritually awaken.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

INTRODUCTION

Many years of formal study in the fields of psychotherapy and spirituality, and six decades of life journey as a human-becoming, have profoundly changed my understandings of Self, God, and what it means to live a spiritually awakened life. I believe a person is spiritually awakened when they have incorporated the spiritual disciplines to live fully in the moment, and have developed a heart that is open to a sense of the sacred. A person who is spiritually awakened has the ability to accept the reality of what is, and is able to internally challenge and explore the many ego beliefs, assumptions, certainties, and expectations that they have unconsciously accumulated over the course of their life. The goal of such exploration is to empty the ego and simply be. A spiritually awakened person lives life in the knowledge that all of one's accumulated words and beliefs are only relative metaphors and concepts that talk about reality; they do not ultimately define reality. For a person who is spiritually awakened, reality can only be experienced.

Many of the ideas presented in this article are not original to me. They are the result of many years of study and reflection. Where I can, I give credit and reference to the source. To those ideas whose sources are lost in the misty years of study, I give thanks that so many great minds have shared their thoughts with me.

The writings of Jesus Seminar scholars and theologians such as Bishop John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Burton Mack, Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Karen King, and Russell Shorto and others, have been very helpful in my attempts to clarify and articulate what I do believe about God and the Christian tradition today. Anthony DeMello, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and James Carse are all seminal writers who have opened my mind and heart to exciting new realities. These are but a few of the more important mentors that journeyed with me over the years and encouraged my awakening. I am deeply indebted to their wisdom.

Most of the models and charts in this paper are of my own creation and design. I have learned over the years that my mind works best with visual and poetic ways of exploring and presenting ideas. In this paper I will use both verbal explanations and my visual models to more clearly present the ideas discussed. The poetry will help to give the words a soul.

The God I speak about in this paper is not the theistic God of the Christian tradition that lives in heaven and keeps tabs on each of his children, but it is the God of creation, the compassionate God of the ancient mystics, and the Sacred Spirit worshiped by the Shamans since the dawn of human culture. I will be talking about a post modern 21st century God in whom I have found the rich meaning and spiritual depth that I have been searching for most of my life; a 21st century God who has grown beyond the limits and confines of primitive theological beliefs.

I, like many non-church going Christians that Bishop Spong refers to as The Christian Alumni Association, spent years wrestling with the primitive, literal, pre-modern God of the Christian Church. It left me wounded and disillusioned. The growing movement toward literalistic, right wing, conservative Christian beliefs left me without a faith I could embrace without committing intellectual suicide.

Because being publicly identified as an ordained Christian pastor has increasingly become an embarrassment, given that "Christian" in our current culture has become increasingly identified with conservative or fundamentalist theology, my search for a deeper spirituality has often been a solitary journey.

I will begin with a brief description of my spiritual journey over the last five decades and conclude with a brief summary of my spiritual home today. I trust that my spiritual journey will continue.

One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began,
Though the voices around you
Kept shouting
Their bad advice-----
Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
Though the wind pried with its stiff fingers
At the very foundations----
Though their melancholy Was terrible.
It was already late enough,
and a wild night,
And the road full of fallen
Branches and stones.
But little by little, as you left their voices behind,
The stars began to burn
Through the sheets of clouds,
And there was a new voice,
Which you slowly
Recognized as your own,
That kept you company
As you strode deeper and deeper
Into the world,
Determined to do
The only thing you could do----
Determined to save
The only live you could save.
The Journey: By Mary Oliver

THE JOURNEY TOWARD A FAITH: THE PRIMITIVE GOD OF CHILDHOOD

To understand the primitive God of my childhood it is first necessary to understand the emotional and developmental stages we all pass through on our journey to adulthood. The first developmental stage is called childhood. It is sometimes referred to as a time of pre-critical naiveté. In other words, children are simple and gullible. This is not a judgmental statement, simply a statement of fact. As children we are simple in the sense that we keep the world safe by splitting everything into categories of good and bad, safe and unsafe, pain and pleasure, and right and wrong. Splitting is a therapeutic term that refers to "black-and-white" , "either - or", and "all-or-nothing" thinking.

Splitting is a very helpful way of understanding the world when we are children. It keeps things simple and understandable for us. However, this primitive childhood all or nothing, black or white way of thinking is very concrete and leaves little or no room for ambiguity, diversity, inclusiveness, or tolerance. In other words, there is no gray in black and white thinking. When this primitive dualistic thinking process is carried into adulthood, the result is a tendency towards judgment and criticism, and it often leads us to create harsh categories of "otherness" so we can comfortably segregate and label those who do not agree with us.

We create these judgmental labels for others because we believe ourselves to be white, right, and good. It is important to remember when we use black and white thinking, we only have two positions to work with; right and wrong. Since we rarely choose to assume we are wrong, when others inevitably disagree with us, they are usually experienced as wrong. Black and white thinking is often referred to as dualistic thinking.

It is virtually impossible to be a dualistic thinker and not be opinionated and judgmental. Others either agree with us, or they are wrong. Since judgment is typically experienced as critical and hurtful, others can quickly become defensive. When this happens, conflict is inevitable.

To state this concept simply, our ego has a great investment in being right. It likes to think that it is the center of the universe. The greater our ego's investment in being right, the more tendency there is for us to become a rigid black and white thinker. In others words, the greater our investment in being right, the greater the potential exists for us to create conflict with others. See chart #1 below.

It is important to understand that every issue needs people who are able to go to both of the fringes and articulate for us the truths that are found there. These people provide us with the invaluable perspectives that come from the extreme fringes of the issue. The problem emerges when one side or the other believes that they alone are the bearers of THE truth; the absolute truth. It is necessary to understand that there is truth in both positions. When we stop searching for the truth in the other persons point of view, we slide quickly into black and white thinking. The inevitable result is conflict; a holy war to proselytize THE truth that only they possess. Until we become God, all truth is relative truth. All truth is gray.

Children are gullible in that they believe without question what their caretakers and the adults in their lives tell them. As a child I had no trouble believing that all the things of the bible were true and factual. It took a faith in my caretakers for me to believe them, but it did not take a faith in the Christian tradition for me to believe that Jesus actually walked on water, was born of a virgin, that a miraculous star appeared in the east, that angels appeared to the shepherds, and that Jesus bodily rose on the third day after his crucifixion.

It would not have occurred to me to question the validity or factuality of these biblical stories. As a child, using a simplistic all or nothing, black and white thinking process, things were either true or not true. Adults said they were true. I simply believed them.

As a child, I hated going to church. I had to take the bus since most Sundays my parents slept in because it was their day of rest from work. Sunday school was held in a very dark room in the basement of the church. There was only one small stained glass window in the room. It was protected by a rusty steel mesh grating that was bolted into the stone wall. It was damp and musty.

In Sunday school I was taught that being a Christian meant I was supposed to be good and believe in Jesus. I was also taught that I had been born a bad person, and that without Jesus' help I could never be good. These teachers taught me that Jesus had been sacrificed by God on a cross and that his blood could somehow take away my badness. I never did really understand how that worked.

Sunday school teachers told me that God, who was definitely male, was "out there somewhere in heaven, sitting on a big throne and keeping tabs on me". They assured me however, that if I prayed hard enough, and had enough faith, God would do what ever I needed Him to do. If God didn't do what I asked Him to do, it meant that either I wasn't praying hard enough, or that I didn't have enough faith. I was afraid of God, but I felt ashamed because my Santa Clause God was obviously not doing what I wanted him to do. I was taught that the reward for being a good Christian was heaven and that Jesus was the only way to heaven. If you weren't Christian, you were going to hell. It didn't seem fair to everyone else, but I didn't question it. I learned that making loud noises and laughing in church was disrespectful to God. God got angry when He wasn't respected. At the same time, the Sunday school teachers told me that it was grace that would get me to heaven, not how good I could be. It was pretty confusing, but they obviously knew what they were talking about. I assumed I just didn't understand it yet.

What amazes me today is that I didn't begin to seriously question these religious beliefs until I was well into adulthood. It took me many years to learn to pay attention to my accumulated beliefs; to understand that my beliefs are not reality. Over the years, I have learned that the world is round whether I believe it---or not.

Today I understand that my beliefs are only relative truths, not absolute truths. So now, I work hard to identify my beliefs, and when I discover them, I question them very carefully. They define who I am and how I behave in the world. Whether my beliefs are conscious or unconscious, they have the power to create pain and suffering, and they have the power to bring compassion. The choice is mine, but only if my beliefs are conscious. I am thankful that today my world is slowly getting grayer.

THE GOD OF MY ADOLESCENCE: THE BEGINNING OF CRITICAL THINKING and THE JOURNEY INTO ADULTHOOD:

I'd been taught that everything in the Bible was not only literally true, but that it came directly from God. Therefore the Bible and Christian faith could not be questioned.

When I entered late childhood and adolescence, I entered a stage of life called critical thinking. Outside of my awareness, I was now beginning to unconsciously question what my teachers and parents had taught me. Much of what I had learned about Christianity from my Sunday school teachers just didn't make sense.

How could Jonah have survived in the belly of a whale? That was ridiculous. How could Mary have been a virgin? There was only one way to get pregnant. Either Mary lied or whoever wrote it down was pretty naive. And why would God insist that we kill homosexuals? One of my friends was gay. It didn't make sense.

As far as the Garden of Eden was concerned, I felt bad enough about myself, I didn't need God telling me I was bad too. How could I have sinned before I was even born. I decided that Jesus was ok, but religion was stupid and God was stupid.

Over time, I eventually discarded most of what I had been taught. When pressed I would agree that I believed in a God, but probably not in the God of the Christian tradition. I was very vague about my beliefs for many years. Life continued.

I graduated in 1962 with a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University. Ten years later I left my job in manufacturing management. I wasn't sure where I was going but I was finally able to admit to myself that working as an engineer was not what I wanted to do with my life. I was intrigued by the writings of the homesteaders and naturalists Scott and Helen Nearing.

Although I wouldn't have described them as such, the Nearings were clearly my spiritual guides during much of the early 1970's. I fell in love with the call to a simpler life. I moved my family to Naples, NY, bought 27 acres of land, and for the next five years we lived off the land as a craftsman / homesteader. We milked goats, raised pigs, had our own chickens and turkeys, and grew virtually all of our own food. I built my own home and barns from rough sawn lumber. And like the Nearings, I built field-stone walls and field-stone foundations for the buildings. In between the homesteading and silversmithing I learned to play the tenor banjo.

Despite five hard working years as a self sufficient homesteader and craftsman, it felt like my life was pretty much a failure. My world was a pretty barren place and my life certainly lacked personal meaning. I was bored and more than a little depressed.

Without knowing it, my spiritual rebirthing and journey back to God had begun. I understand today, there is no spiritual birthing without pain, and that an awakened, authentic spirituality is a lifetime journey. But at the time, because I was stuck in the stage of critical thinking that had rejected most of what I had been taught in childhood, I was convinced that I wasn't a real Christian. The birthing process had started, but I had a long way to go.

Throughout the 70's, the painful loneliness of childhood and the compelling childhood need to belong and be in community continued to manifest itself in a strong attraction to be part of the Christian Church. The inner conflict over my faith had long since disappeared from my consciousness, but I couldn't stop thinking about God. I played the organ in a Roman Catholic Church for a while. I went to various Christian renewal programs over the years. I spent a lot of time with people who claimed to be real Christians, but inside I felt guilty. I felt like a phony, because at some level of awareness I knew I wasn't a real Christian. Real Christians believed. I couldn't.

After five years of living the simple life as a homesteader, I knew that I needed to resolve the inner conflict. The struggle between my lack of faith as a Christian and my need to "belong" could no longer be ignored. The quiet call to a more spiritual life began to invade my awareness like a gentle wind blowing fall leaves across the dry barren ground of my life. I was beginning to awaken. My soul was stirring.

In the fall of 1978 I visited Colgate Rochester Divinity "just to see what a seminary looked like". It was a seminal event in my life. When I opened the door began to walk the halls toward the registrars office, I knew that I had, in some very strange way, come home.

I began my seminary education that Spring. I made friends with some of the more conservative students in my class. I guess I was hoping that some of their faith would rub off on me. They rose to the challenge, but despite many hours of theological debate over uncounted cups of coffee, I remained unconvinced. It still didn't make a lot of sense, but the crisis was averted when it became clear that I was being called to a pastoral counseling ministry.

I began my formal training and certification as a Pastoral Counselor in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors in the early 1980's. It was a path of training, supervision, and personal therapy that would define my life journey for the next 20 years. I received a seminary education, but my faith beliefs were secondary to my education in psychotherapy and pastoral counseling. The inner conflicts over my faith and religious beliefs were put on hold for another ten years.

In 1987 I was ordained an Elder in the United Methodist Church, served as a Chaplain/Counselor at a local college, opened a private practice in pastoral psychotherapy, and eventually became a certified Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. I served eight years on the North Central United Methodist Board of Ordained Ministry but I often found myself avoiding my clergy colleagues because I felt alienated. I didn't feel like I belonged. The conflict hadn't gone away.

Despite years of seminary training, theological studies, and efforts to become an ordained Christian Pastor, I still could not fully believe in the Christian doctrines and Christian theology. I was unable to pray publicly to a theistic God that I didn't believe existed. To do so felt too hypocritical. It was actually embarrassing to me to admit through public prayer that I actually believed in such a God.

I was out of Egypt but I was still wandering in a dry and barren desert looking for my spiritual home. It was a lonely time of isolation and alienation from the Christian community, and most of the time I felt the gnawing shame and pain of failure. In hindsight, I can see clearly that it was simply the lonely pain of yet another spiritual birthing in my life journey.

"Our metaphors go on ahead of us. They know before we do. And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow study. I need something to serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can hold what's too slippery, or charged or difficult to touch. Will doesn't have much to do with this, I can't choose what's going to serve as a compelling image for me. But I've learned to trust that part of the imagination that gropes forward, feeling for what it needs; to watch for fascination, for signs of compelled attention (look at me, something seems to say, closely ) that indicates there's something I need to attend to.

I almost always begin with description, as a way of focusing on that compelling image, the poem's "given". I know that what I see is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg; if I do my work of study and examination, and if I am lucky, the image will become a metaphor, will yield depth and meaning, will lead me to insight. The goal here is inquiry."
By poet Mark Doty

POST-CRITICAL NAIVETÉ: SPIRITUAL MATURITY:

After a decade in formal pastoral counseling training and ministry I realized that I was not going to find the spirituality that had called me into ministry in the religious beliefs of the institutional Christian church. I was unable to define what I meant by spirituality, but I knew it had to do with silence, simplicity, listening, and living in the moment.

I began to study Buddhist psychology and meditation. As I studied the Buddhist teachers and learned about Buddhist and eastern concepts of emptiness, I began to see how the conflict created by the primitive dualistic thinking process of the Christian faith and black and white thinking, in general, was so intrinsically caustic to the ideas of non-violence and world peace.

As I pointed out earlier, there is no way to avoid the judgment, or the pain and suffering that emerges from dualistic thinking. Some one has to be white, right and good. Someone therefore has to be black, bad, and wrong. When there are only two colors to work with i.e. black and white, the battle for right, white, and good automatically leads to conflict. The Christian belief that Jesus is the only true path to God is a dualistic belief that can only lead to painful conflict with anyone who walks a different path toward the Creator. Anyone who even questions the fundamental beliefs of Christianity is very quickly labeled as wrong and often defined as evil.

Unfortunately, primitive dualistic thinking permeates our human culture. Examples of such thinking is endless; Pakistan vs. India, the United States vs. the Soviet Union, Israel vs. Palestine, the black vs. white of racism, the male vs. female of sexism, rich vs. poor, educated western cultures vs. uneducated third world cultures, teacher vs. student, Republicans vs. Democrats, adults vs. children, homosexual vs. heterosexual, abortion vs. right to life..the list is endless. The pain and suffering caused by primitive dualistic thinking is endless.

As I studied the spiritual lives of Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Jesus, Buddha, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, and others I learned that they all encouraged us to live lives based on the principle of non-violence. These spiritual teachers taught me that any human belief that builds walls that create an us-versus-them "otherness", is inherently caustic to compassionate communities and world peace. Put simply, categories of "otherness" created by dualistic thinking inevitably leads to violence.

Over time, I came to understand that it is only thru unity, diversity, oneness, and the ego emptiness of the middlepath we will encounter peace and compassion. The ego needs to be right. The ego that needs to be right will create conflict and suffering. The ego that has emptied itself of the need to be right can create compassion.

Until we learn to empty our ego of it's beliefs and certainties, the roots of conflict and suffering will reside in our own hearts. This emptying of ego certainties is what I call the emptiness of middlepath theology. Middlepath spirituality is experiential. It can only be experienced in the moment.

Middlepath spirituality can often be seen more clearly in Pagan, Native American, and Buddhist religious cultures where all of creation is considered sacred; where all of creation contains Spirit. There is less focus on dualistic categories of sacred and secular. The theology of these religions tends to be more focused on gratitude and simply learning to pay attention to the sacredness of each moment.

The more our ego can learn to empty itself, the more we will find ourselves walking the middlepath. The middlepath is not a thing to achieve. It doesn't actually exist. It simply is. One does not do compassion. One simply is compassion.

Over time, I came to understand that I could only find God on the middle path in the gray between black and white thinking As I struggled to intentionally integrate spirituality and psychotherapy, I began little by little to construct a God that would be found on the middlepath. A God that is middlepath.. It was deeply satisfying to me that the God of the middlepath was a God I could intellectually believe in and worship without reservation. See Diagram #2 below.

My life long struggle to believe in a Christian tradition that had THE truth and believed Jesus was THE only path to salvation was over. It not only didn't make sense to me any longer, it was actually the antithesis of what I now believed. I could not find the God of the Christian tradition on the middlepath. In fact, I began to understand that the God of the orthodox Christian church was an institutionalized God of black and white thinking; who throughout history has been a religious source of much violence, judgment, conflict, pain and suffering! This primitive, black and white God of judgment and suffering is manifest clearly in the teachings of all fundamentalist religions. The God of the Christian tradition is a God that has been created by human egos. For me, this God is dead.

All fundamentalism is by definition, primitive black and white thinking .Diversity, inclusiveness, change, and openness to modern theological interpretation for the post- modern world is not allowed.

The one thing I became certain about was that any religion that claimed to be or have THE truth was the antithesis of what my middlepath God and Jesus were all about. I was an ordained pastor in the Methodist Church but I knew in my heart that I would never again struggle to be an orthodox Christian.

Jesus' ministry was about justice and breaking down the ego created barriers that separated people whether it was the purity laws of the Jewish temple, the boundaries that were built inside families, or the boundaries that separated tax collectors, prostitutes, and women in general. Jesus systematically tore down the barriers that created any sense of us versus them categories. I believe Jesus was clearly calling us to live on the middlepath. He called it the Kingdom of God where everyone is simply a child of God. A kingdom where every thing and every one is created by God and therefore sacred. A kingdom where God's generosity, love and compassion were unlimited.

For most of the 90's I avoided telling people that I was an ordained pastor. I referred to myself as a Christian Buddhist, because , as I said earlier, I was deeply embarrassed to admit that I was a pastor of the dualistic, exclusivistic and literalistic beliefs of the orthodox Christian church. I was clearly a clergy member of The Christian Alumni Association.

My self-identity confusion grew into a crisis. Was I a Christian Buddhist? What did that mean? Should I just quit the Christian ministry? Should I openly challenge the Church? Should I simply be a pastoral counselor in private practice? I continued to study and grapple with the integration of psychotherapy and spirituality. I began attending workshops and seminars with others who were also working to find ways to bring these two disciplines together.

In the mid 90's I founded the Stonyhill Institute of Spirituality and Psychotherapy to begin a formal exploration into the integration of spirituality and psychotherapy. If walking the middlepath requires emptying the ego of it's beliefs and certainties, then spiritual growth is inherently grounded in psychological growth and increased self-awareness. Stated simply, there is no spiritual growth without an increase in self-awareness. In other words, to walk the middlepath requires that one have deep insight and personal self-awareness.

I began writing about middlepath theology and published my articles on my website (www.stonyhill.com). I had cracked the theological door, but I was still in my theological closet. I hadn't come out yet. I was increasingly uncomfortable with the "self" I showed to the world. I was pastoral psychotherapist helping clients learn how to live authentic lives and I was not living authentically myself. The inner conflict and struggle intensified.

The confusion continued until about five years ago when I began reading books and articles published by biblical scholars working with the Jesus Seminar. It was a revelation! Here were world class biblical scholars who were saying what I had believed for most of my life! For the first time I not only had the middlepath words and concepts to clearly articulate the middlepath theology that I believed in, I now had the emotional and intellectual support of others who were also struggling to re-vision the orthodox Christian tradition.

I wasn't alone!

I learned that Jesus Seminar theologians like Marcus Borg, Robert Funk, Karen King , John Crossan, Bishop John S. Spong, Walter Wink, and hundreds of others were publishing books and articles based on modern biblical scholarship calling for a re-visioning of the Christian faith. In fact, they were saying that a re-visioning of Christianity is essential or the Christian religion will eventually become another irrelevant religion of human history.

Biblical scholarship by world class theologians and scholars who have been searching for the historical Jesus for over 15 years are now systematically challenging the literalizing of what were obviously historical metaphors! Their research and scholarship to discover the historical Jesus is showing clearly that for over 2000 years we have "metaphorized our history and then literalized our metaphors" into a Christian theology and tradition. A theology and religion based on the primitive beliefs that a barbaric human blood sacrifice had somehow appeased the God of the Christian Church.

I now had a way of returning to my Christian roots. As I read the books and articles that were being published by the Jesus Seminar, the Christian bible and Christian traditions were, for the first time, becoming a source of truth for me. Only this time the truth was not literal, it was embedded in metaphor and story. I could now read the bible like a shaman. "I don't know if it actually happened this way, but I know this story to be true." Scripture now was a lens that I could use to discover the sacred here and now in my own life. The words and stories in the bible were simply human records of how others had discovered God in their lives.

What is clear to me after more than two decades of study and spiritual growth is that our Christian understanding of God must come off of the fringes of black and white thinking and find it's place securely in the grayness of the middle path; a place of emptiness, not knowing, paradox and deep listening to the silence.

Only then will we hear the still small voice of God whispering music from our souls.

COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET: SPIRITUAL MATURITY

There is a growing truth for me in the words of T.S.Elliot who reminds me that there is really nothing to fear from our spiritual struggles because at the end of all our personal explorations, we will arrive back at the self we started from and know in our hearts that we finally belong there.

The same seems to be true for my own personal explorations of God. I began my life journey as a Christian in childhood. I was ordained as an Elder in the United Methodist Church. I wrestled for many years with Christian theology. And today, as a Christian-Buddhist I find myself back where I began my journey; simply a child of God., But, like Jacob, without the struggle I would never have found the spiritual peace that I enjoy today.

So how has the journey back to where I began changed me?

I still consider myself a Christian, but I am now deeply non-exclusivist in my Christian theological beliefs. Christianity is only one path to the Creator. It is not the only path. As the mystics say, there are many wells, but there is only one River of Life.

Secondly, I no longer believe in a literal interpretation of the Christian biblical tradition. I now understand the Christian biblical stories to be simply profound sources of metaphoric truths.

And lastly, I find myself taking the words of the historical Jesus much more seriously today than I did as a younger Christian. I find myself increasingly pacifist in my search for peace and justice. I believe that the social and economic inequities that breed angry conflict, unrest and terrorism must be replaced with compassion. "Do unto others" needs to become a global way of life, not just an empty feel good quotation from scripture.

I no longer believe that Jesus is going to come to "save" us from our own actions and choices. Jesus has shown us what must be done and what it means to live a compassionate life. It is now our responsibility to create a compassionate world. God is incarnate in all of us, not just in Jesus. We have the gift of consciousness. I deeply believe that it is now our responsibility to become co-creators with God. Spirit will guide us but the responsibility of on-going creation is ours. In the words of Barbara Marx Hubbard, we can no longer embrace the pro-creation, survival of the fittest model of human evolution that has existed for millennia, we must now become co-creators and embrace a conscious evolutionary path for humanity. We must learn to walk the middlepath.

Walking the middlepath is no longer an option. We are no longer fighting with spears and bows and arrows. The people who use black and white dualistic thinking in the 21st century now have weapons of mass destruction with the ability to destroy the planet we live on. The World Trade Towers was a violent reminder that, for many people around the world, there is nothing to lose by the use of terrorism, and perhaps, much to gain. They are not "the evil ones". They are the disenfranchised. They are the powerless ones. We unconsciously helped to create them. We can no longer afford to be blind to our participation in the politics of inequity. We must learn to evolve consciously. We must learn to walk the middlepath.

We are rapidly becoming a global community, but we are not yet a compassionate global culture. We must learn to develop more compassionate and caring ways of living together on this earth we call home. We are not yet willing to see the suffering of people in other countries and cultures as our problem. We must learn to walk the middlepath.

I am convinced that unless we return to the metaphoric truths of Christian tradition and give up the need to believe in the literal interpretation and inerrancy of ancient primitive stories and beliefs, the Christian Alumni Association will continue to grow, and the main line Christian Churches will continue to wither and die.

In the early years of the Christian church, people struggled to put into words the holiness and the presence of God that they experienced in the person called Jesus of Nazareth. For 2000 years the Christian Church has struggled to hold onto power by literalizing the metaphoric stories and words of these early gospel writers. What would it mean to go back once again to the words and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth? What would it mean to understand that the Christ of faith is simply 2000 years of accumulated tradition that has been turned into inerrant holy scriptures and creeds.

I believe that the Christian church is at the crossroads of the most important decision it has ever had to make; to defend a dying primitive theology that no longer has the ability to speak to a post-modern 21st century culture, or journey forward into an unknown world of the 21st century with the courage to embrace the words of all our great spiritual leaders such as Buddha, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus of Nazareth, and listen closely to what they tried to teach us. To walk the middlepath they all call us to walk will require that we empty our ego's of most of our 2000 years of accumulated traditions and beliefs and go back with an attitude of not knowing to the teachings of these great teachers who all tried to point us to God. They all taught that the only path to God is the middlepath of tolerance, non-violence, inclusiveness, and compassion. Whether the Christian tradition becomes a dead theology or a vital spirituality that can lead us into the global culture of the third millennium is still up in the air.

The choice is ours. History will tell us whether we had the courage to spiritually awaken and live consciously on the middlepath.

CONCLUSION AND A BRIEF SUMMARY: WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE? WHAT DOES BEING A CHRISTIAN MEAN TO ME?

The only spirituality that makes sense to me at this point in my life journey is a middlepath spirituality based on unity, emptiness, silence, listening, non-violence, tolerance, diversity, uncertainty, and not-knowing as described below. (See the Appendix and Diagram #2).

For me, the middlepath is spirituality. However, it is necessary to understand that the middlepath is not something to believe in, it is not something to achieve, it is simply a conscious way of seeing and thinking. It is gray. It is non-violent. It is compassion. It simply is.

I can no longer support or believe in a religion that, through its core teachings of exclusivity, espouses the tenants of fundamentalist black and white thinking. There are many wells, but there is only one river. Christianity is only one way of understanding God. Jesus told me to love myself, to love others, and to love God. Period. He did not say love others unless they are ____________, or love them when they _____________.

Like all the great spiritual teachers of history, Jesus taught us to walk the middlepath; a path of love and compassion. He taught us to tear down the walls built by our own egos; walls that separate us from one another and create labels and categories of "otherness". He taught that the dualistic beliefs that create these walls are the source of judgment, intolerance, injustice, and suffering. He taught that we are simply all children of God. If we are to call ourselves Christians we must not "believe" in Jesus, we must listen carefully to the words and teachings of the historical Jesus and take them seriously

Thus, it no longer makes sense for me to support any political, religious, social, cultural, or nationalistic beliefs or ideologies that are not grounded on middlepath principles. I can no longer support dualistic beliefs or ideologies that support splitting and judgmental categories of "otherness" that lead to violence, conflict, and suffering.

The 10th grade textbook for one of the five required religion classes taught in all Saudi public schools states: "It is compulsory for the Muslims to be loyal to each other and to consider the infidels their enemy". These children are being taught intolerance. They must be taught tolerance and diversity.

Western Christian education teaches children about the inerrancy of the Bible and that the true church is a body of believers who worship Jesus as the only path to heaven, and that he will return to create his reign. These children are being taught intolerance. They must be taught tolerance and diversity.

Intolerance is intolerance, no matter where it is found. Human do not possess absolute truth. We can believe and have faith in whatever religion makes sense to us, but we must understand that it is simply our faith. It is a relative truth only. Others will need to find their path. And whatever that path may be, it too will only be a relative truth. Because all things in creation are sacred, there is truth is all things. All faiths are found on the middlepath because all faith paths lead to God.

In the words of Rev. John S. Spong
I experience God as the source of life in the act of living fully.
I experience God as the source of love in the act of loving wastefully.
I experience God as the Ground of being in the act of having the courage to be.
I serve the God that I meet in Jesus, not by trying to convert others to my way of believing, but by seeking to transform the world so that every person might have that God-like capacity to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each person can be.

Difference is the essence of thought.

For Jesus, "the kingdom of God was a realm without social boundaries, a kingdom where there was neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, homosexual nor heterosexual. I am a Christian because I am a follower of Jesus. Although I do not believe his is the only way, it is my way to live and to relate to God. Jesus is my gift from God: pointing the way, affirming the good, and breaking down the walls that divide.

As a human being, I am radically finite. I am infinitely in the process of becoming. As I grow, I will not "get there". To "get there" would be to become God. There will always be more that I can become. But with every step forward in my spiritual journey, I transcend who I was, and at the same time I bring with me the person that I was before the transformation. With every step, I find myself walking more and more on the sacred ground of the middlepath. This is the infinite process of my becoming.

In this way I become who I was created to be, but I never stop being who I am. In this way we all become who we were created to be, but we never stop being who we are.

As Thomas Sheehan says in this article From Divinity to Infinity,

"There is no place in the universe that we are not at home. There is no tree in the Garden of Eden whose fruit we cannot eat. Every step we take forward is answered by the horizon moving a step backward. All we perform are endless acts of self-transcendence; and in that way we endlessly humanize the world, learning to be at home every where with it."

I am finally finding my place within the Christian tradition. It is not a place of literal truth, but it is a place filled to overflowing with relative truths about a God that continues to stay behind the horizon as my spiritual journey unfolds. With each step that I take on this spiritual journey, I find myself walking more and more consciously on the middlepath. Anthony DeMello and other mystics call this waking up. As a Buddhist friend of mine says "Wake up my friend, your dying"! "May I be fully awake and alive when I die".

I will never see over the horizon, but the compassionate middlepath is a much more gentle and loving path than the black and white path of my childhood.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking, So that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, Our presence automatically liberates others."
Nelson Mandela's Inaugural speech adopted from Marianne Williamson

I have met many pastors who are themselves struggling with the current conservative Christian theology demanded by their parishioners. They know that the old metaphors can no longer be interpreted literally to a post-modern educated congregation. Unfortunately these pastors are very limited in what they can openly talk about since they and their families depend on a church income. Often, they are literally forbidden in many churches, by what is often a small conservative minority, to explore a more contemporary liturgy and theology.

I believe that it is imperative that these pastors be allowed to dialog and interact with new Christian understandings that are emerging from modern biblical scholarship. Jesus Seminar scholars are very clear that the Christian theology of the future and the future of the Christian faith to mediate the sacred in the post-modern world will emerge from those who are ministering day by day in the trenches. It will not come from academia.

Unless our pastors are freed from the shackles that keep them in silent bondage to a primitive understanding of the Jesus of history, the church will continue to lose it's ability to speak to a 21st century culture. The more the old metaphors lose their ability to heal and have meaning, the more vocal and extremist the fundamentalist are becoming. The Jesus of history is increasingly becoming separated from the Christ of faith. His words and his message must become the bedrock as the theology of the Christian faith is reinterpreted for the 21st century.

The era of religious totalitarianism must be relegated to history. The world needs religions that embrace a tolerant, inclusive middlepath theology. It is my hope, that I, and those who gather in dialog at the Stonyhill Institute, can be a part of this important and exciting new future. A relevant Christian theology re-visioned for the 21st century.

APPENDIX: A BRIEF SUMMARY OF MY BELIEVES ABOUT GOD, PRAYER, THE BIBLE, AND JESUS AT THIS POINT IN MY JOURNEY:

1) MY UNDERSTANDING OF GOD:

God is not a human like being who lives out there somewhere and keeps tabs on us.
God is the creator of all things.
God is present in all creation.
God poured itself into it's creation. Therefore everything in creation is sacred. There is no part of creation that can be profane or not sacred. Everything is One. Everything is ceremony.
God is hard to see when people approach with the judgment and conflict that comes when one is armed with THE truth.
God does not fiddle with creation, but always works to bring redemption out of all things through the energy of love, compassion, healing, creation, and consciousness..
God does not tinker, free will is free will.
God limited its power when humans were given the gift of consciousness. With the gift of free will and consciousness, we became co-creators of this universe with God. The gift of consciousness means that we are responsible for what we create.
God does not get in the way of what we choose to create.
God does not get in the way of consequences. When we create pain and suffering,
God grieves, but does not interfere.
God is ultimate consciousness. There is no form (creation) without consciousness.
God is love therefore love and compassion manifest God.
God is life therefore we should live into our full humanity.
God is the Ground of All Being therefore we need to become the fully human beings we were created to be.
God is paradox. Therefore God is both the unity of all things, and the diversity of all creation.
God is I AM. The "i am" we call our soul is simply the "I AM" of the Creator of the Universe that resides in each of us.

2) MY UNDERSTANDING OF PRAYER:

Prayer is learning to listen to God.
Prayer is openness. The only prayer that makes sense to me is "thy will be done".
The purpose of prayer is not instant ego wish gratification.
The purpose of prayer is to increase the love, the compassion, the healing, our self-awareness, our self-consciousness, the emptiness of our minds, forgiveness, service to others, justice, and ultimately, to promote non-violence in our universe.
Prayer uses the consciousness and creative energy of God in the ongoing creation of the universe.
The purpose of prayer is co-creation. Through prayer and the gift of human consciousness we are co-creators with God and as such are responsible with God for the on-going creation of this universe.
Thru prayer, God influences us with his love and compassion. We are always being called to God, prayer is the act of listening to God calling us to love and compassion.
Every choice and every action is a prayer.
There is positive prayer and negative prayer.
Positive prayer is behavior and choices that promote love and compassion.
Positive prayer is emptiness of ego.
Negative prayer is behavior and choices that create conflict, pain and suffering.
Negative prayer is the black and white thinking of the ego which creates categories and labels of "otherness".
All prayer is driven by our thought process and the beliefs of our own egos.
We co-create with God through positive prayer and negative prayer. This is true whether our behaviors and choices are conscious or unconscious.
Positive prayer which creates compassion and love require that we be self-conscious and empty of ego.
Positive prayer is created on the middlepath and leads to healing, openness, creativity, love, compassion, unity, and becoming fully human.
Positive prayer works with life/God.
Negative prayer is created in human ego and leads to wounding, closed, non-creative certainty, categories of otherness, judgment, rejection, divisive, and fear.
Negative prayer works against life/God.
Prayers of thanksgiving, intercessory prayers and petitionary prayers can be very caring and compassionate but prayer cannot be a demand or a request for a theistic deity out there somewhere to do our bidding.
Prayer is descending to that deepest part of who we are as pure being, and then listening with full consciousness and attention to the music coming from our soul.

3) MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE:

The bible is comprised of non-literalistic stories that contain deep human metaphoric truths. It cannot be read or understood in a literal sense or the wisdom and meaning of the metaphor is lost. We can only approach scripture with the openness to say, "I don't know if it happened this way or not, but I know that it is true."
The bible is a human product, not a diving product. The bible describes ancient Israel's and the early Jesus movement's way of understanding God. A literal interpretation of stories and metaphors would have made no sense for the ancient culture it was written for, and it makes even less sense for us to literally interpret these ancient stories and metaphors for a 21st century culture.
The bible is a lens. It points to God through story and metaphor. It is the mediator of the sacred so that the sacred becomes present to us in our finite humanity.
The bible is not in itself a holy or sacred text any more than Jesus was holy or sacred.
When we read the bible, it is clear that Jesus taught his disciples to pay attention to God, not to him. Jesus was not a Christian.
The bible is not a blueprint on how to get to heaven. It's purpose is to help us through stories and metaphor to become co-creators with God so as to transform this life that we living right here and now and fill it with love, compassion and justice.
The bible is a guide on how to become responsible co-creators with God in the on-going creation of this universe.

4) MY UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS

Jesus was fully human. He did not bodily rise to heaven on the third day, and he was not born of a virgin. Those are mythic stories of how the early Jesus movement saw Jesus. To have "spiritual authority" in ancient cultures, one had to be born of a virgin, rise into the heavens and have a working relationship with a God. Without these three criteria, you couldn't join the club. Thus early Christian writers had to use these metaphors to establish Jesus' authority as an important spiritual figure.
Jesus taught us that the purpose of life is not getting to heaven. He was clear that salvation is available to us right here. All we have to do is wake up. We are living in the kingdom of God. He was clear that the kingdom of God is present.
Jesus taught that the purpose of life is co-creation and transformation in this life so as to become all we are capable of becoming. · Jesus systematically tore down the walls and beliefs that created labels and categories of "otherness". Thus, any belief that creates judgmental labels or categories of "other" is profoundly anti-Jesus and thus anti-Christian. This would include the sovereignty of Christ as the only Savior. The only way to eternal life. The only way to heaven.
The historical Jesus must be understood apart from the Christology of the early church The pre-Easter Jesus is not the same Jesus as the metphorized post-Easter Christ of faith. Unless we keep them separate, we risk losing them both. In other words, the Jesus of history is dead and therefore irrelevant, and the post-Easter Jesus is dead and in heaven. All we can do is be obedient and wait for him to come back. The historical Jesus is available to us if we can discover him and separate him from the ancient metaphoric stories of the risen Christ.
Jesus was a remarkable human being but he did not have the power of God, nor did he have the mind of God. Like Beethoven in music and Van Goth in art, Jesus (in the words of William James in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience) was a spiritual genius.
Jesus taught us what the life of a person full of God might look like. Thus the early Christian movement used metaphors like messiah, lamb of god, word of god, wisdom of god, son of god, etc. to describe the sense of holiness that surrounded him.

5) WHAT DO I MEAN BY MIDDLE PATH THEOLOGY: (See diagram #2)

Middlepath means knowing that the walls and labels that create "other" are the source of conflict, pain and suffering. · Middlepath means eliminating the walls built out of the ideas, beliefs, and certainties of our egos. Jesus tore down the walls that divided people from one another.
The middle path is learning to be with reality and experience reality directly.
Middlepath is emptiness. Emptiness is non-ego.
Middle path means knowing that there are no absolute truths in this finite world, only relative truths. Jesus did not ask people to change before he broke bread with them. He encouraged them to grow.
When we walk the middlepath, we live without certainty. We see our beliefs as illusions. Our understand that our beliefs are only concepts about reality. Reality can only be experienced. Thus God can only be experienced. The moment we use words to describe God or reality, we are back into illusion. The is true also for truth, love, and beauty.
Walking the middlepath is learning to live with gray, paradox, and uncertainty. Walter Bruggerman said " there is great danger in domesticating mystery with excessive certitude".
Middlepath spirituality is learning to live with what is, not what our egos think should be.
Walking the middlepath is learning to give up resistance to living in the here and now. The past is no more and the future is not yet. The only reality, the only place where we can experience the Kingdom of God is now, in this moment. This is called being awake.
Walking the middlepath is embracing our human finiteness. God is always just beyond the horizon. We can journey toward God but as we do, the horizon recedes. We can never see past the horizon.
On the middlepath, we learn to own our own feelings and beliefs as our own. As humans we possess only relative truth, not absolute truth.
Walking the middlepath means knowing that no one can make us feel anything that is not already inside us. Others can only remind us of feelings we have already experienced.
Middlepath spirituality means that God is experienced only in the silence and in the attitude of listening.
Middlepath means we become compassion. We do not "do" compassion. Compassion, unity, and love are found only on the middlepath. Compassion and love are not a thing or skill we achieve or learn, they are simply who we already are. They emerge naturally as we become self-aware and empty ourselves of our ego beliefs and certainties.
The middlepath is a place of equality, diversity, tolerance, humility, non-violent relationships, and justice. The human ego creates categories of power. The ego struggles to be right, good, in control. Any one or any thing that does not conform to the beliefs of our ego, are seen as a threat. The ego labels them as "other" or "them". Ego is based on the concept of survival of the fittest
The middlepath is a attitude of vulnerability.
Middlepath is a place of dialogue. Compassionate community is built on dialogue. The ego thrives on monologue.
Middlepath is unity and oneness. There is no "otherness" on the middlepath because there is no ego. There is only emptiness and pure experience.
The middlepath is a place of not knowing. It is the absolute gray between the black and white categories of the human ego. If one person's ego is yellow and the other persons ego is blue, the middlepath is green. There is truth in everything because everything was created by the Creator.
To walk the middle path is to walk on sacred ground. Everything in creation is sacred. Thus everything is ceremony. It is important to remember that truth is paradox. All creation is sacred and we cannot walk on ground that is not sacred, but there is no middlepath. One can only grow towards a life lived on the middlepath. To reach the middlepath is to become God.
The middlepath is paradox. It is a place of absolute truth and a place of not knowing and uncertainty. The middlepath is both absolute emptiness and total diversity. The middle path is the unchanging ground of being, and a place of on-going change and creativity because creation requires a process of flexibility and change. Without change, there can be no creativity. The ego struggles against change. Beliefs, opinions, and certainties thrive on unchanging rigidity and inflexibility. Thus the ego struggles against the reality of God. This is call being asleep.
The middlepath is inclusive. The ego thrives on exclusive. Me. Mine. Us. Them.
The middle path is pro-active. The beliefs of black and white thinking are reactive.
Middlepath is right hemisphere. Only story, myth, metaphor, empathy, and meaning are found on the middlepath. They reflect the heart wisdom of the soul. Facts are left hemisphere objects found and studied by the ego at the outer boundaries of black and white thinking. They reflect the intellect of the mind.
The middlepath is the Pure Consciousness of the Creator. There is no form (creation) without consciousness. Middlepath is consciousness.
The middlepath is a place of learning to pay attention, becoming self-aware, and self-conscious. This is called enlightenment. It is the ability to live life fully awake.
Middlepath is spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is simply awakening to what is, rather than what the ego thinks "should" be.
Middlepath is awakening. The middlepath is the source of Consciousness and awakening. Sin is a lack of awareness; being asleep and trapped in the ego. Sin is unconsciousness. Sin is ignorance.
Middlepath is light. Light is sharing in the consciousness and free will of the Creator as fully responsible co-creators. The light of co-creation is found in our own hearts. What we choose to look at will be in the light. What we choose to ignore will remain in the darkness. Darkness is the other side of what is known.. The darkness has a purpose, it exists to be transformed into light. The light that will give birth to a new creation can only come from our own hearts.

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1. A Brief Look At Christianity For The 21st Century: A Personal Journey

by Dick Rauscher

Abstract

1. A Brief Look At Christianity For The 21st Century:
A Personal Journey