Starting Over

[Audacia]

Welcome to my blog. I hope you find it compelling and that you might learn a few things from it. Feel free to comment in the commentary thread. Thanks for reading!

Follow my blog on tumblr here.

It’s time to be brutally honest. I’m a seventeen year old boy who has been raised as a Roman Catholic. I attended Catholic grammar school and a Catholic LaSallian high school. For thirteen years, religion has been a part of my academic experience. I have been baptized into the Catholic Church, have received the sacraments of the Eucharist and Reconciliation, and have been confirmed as a full-fledged member of the Catholic faith. And after seventeen years, now that I have graduated from high school and have started to prepare myself for the challenges of college, I am re-examining my Christian faith. And it’s not just any normal re-examination. I am discarding everything that has been indoctrinated in me. I am tearing down the walls of what my parents want me to believe, what my Church tells me I should believe, what I think I know I believe. All that I will keep with me is my desire to learn more, know more, and discern more about the monotheistic God of the Hebrews. Otherwise, I am re-building my faith from the ground up. And I will do so by balancing historical evidence with personal experience, by looking at the divine in a whole new way, by reading the Bible through a critical and analytic lens, by deciding for myself what I believe to be good and right and just and above all, true. I invite you to follow me on my spiritual journey. I hope that you may gain truth and knowledge from my approach and ultimately my conclusions. I begin this journey with a wide open mind, without any preconceived notions about what faith should be. And so, I take the first step.

For years and years and years and years I have been told and taught who Jesus was, who he still is, how he acted, how he prayed, how he lived his life as poor rabbi from the small town of Nazareth. Jesus is at the core of the Christian faith. Christians claim he is the Son of God, the Messiah, our Savior, the life and the light of the world. Before I begin asking questions like “Do I believe in God?” or “Do I believe in hell?” I think it is crucial I have a sound, historical understanding of the early Hebrews, Jesus, and the earliest Christians. I start with Jesus because, for me, he is the most intriguing. Here you have this small-town carpenter that lived over two thousand years ago that over two billion people on this planet worship as a divine figure. That’s pretty impressive. So who was this Jesus? What do we know about him? What made him so special? I’m going to try and answer those questions.

So let’s outline what almost all scholars agree to be definitive information about Jesus. First and foremost, he existed. You might think that’s a given, but surprisingly many people out there actually believe Jesus is a myth conjured by early Christians. However, sufficient historical evidence points to the existence of Jesus, so we’ll start there. Second, he was baptized by John the Baptist and, shortly thereafter, crucified by Roman authorities. Again, almost all scholars believe this information to be factual. And that’s…well…it. From here on, everything in the Gospels, everything we hear about what Jesus did and what kind of person he was is up for debate. There’s no real consensus. The historical Jesus really is shrouded in mystery. To help solve that mystery, I will consult an expert on the historical Jesus, Bart D. Ehrman. More specifically, I will consult his book, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. I hope this answers some of the questions I have about Jesus. Let me remind you, in no way am I going to pretend I’m some learned scholar who knows all sorts of things about the Christian faith or the Bible. I actually know very little. And so this book will help provide a foundation for me to build upon when it comes to understanding the historical Jesus. As I progress through the book, I will write down what I have learned, what I fail to understand, and what I am skeptical about. I hope to be back soon with lots of information!

[Audacia]

Quick sidetrack. Before I begin reading Bart D. Ehrman’s book about the historical Jesus, I am obliged to finish the book I am currently reading, a fascinating and groundbreaking book called What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell. Yes, that’s right, it was written by Rob Bell, the controversial pastor and author of Love Wins, a book which I also read. I find Bell’s positions on God, salvation, and religion in general extraordinarily refreshing and, at the same time, quite powerful. I have come to really appreciate his teachings and I foresee that his beliefs will play an integral role in re-examining my own faith. For example, I came across an interesting passage in What We Talk About When We Talk About God in which Rob describes a time in his life when he seriously doubted the existence of God. Being a pastor expected to deliver an inspiring sermon week after week, he explains the severity of the situation. He also explains how when so many people are faced with doubt and uncertainty of the divine, they’re not quite sure how to handle it. They’re not very confident about what direction their doubt and uncertainty should take them. And then he says that he hopes this book might help with how to handle spiritual misgivings.



Obviously, that particular bit excited me. This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been looking for. So before I dive into Ehrman’s book, I’m going to keep track of my thoughts on Rob’s book first. I think it’s a valid and appropriate place to begin before I learn more about the historical Jesus. With that out of the way, I want to talk about one more thing I recently came across in Rob’s book.

Rob talks about the either/or many people face when confronting the idea of God. You can either choose reason, logic, and science, and dismiss the notion of some all-loving divine being who watches over us, or you can choose the narrow-minded, exclusive, you’re wrong and I’m right perception of God held by so many people today. And he proposes the perception of a God who is with us, for us, and ahead of us, a God that does not draw us back to primitive times but who draws us forward to more progressive times. He talks about a God who is all-loving, yes, but also a God who accepts people from all walks of life. And he talks about a God that works through science, not a God that inhibits progress. And it’s this God, this divine being, that I find myself rooting for. This is a God that I can get behind, a God that I can believe in. And though I’ve only read a small portion of the book thus far, I can honestly say, “Now this is what I’m talking about.”

[Audacia]

Some food for thought. The word “hell” is used eleven times by Jesus in the New Testament. The Greek word that gets translated as “hell” in English is the word “Gehenna.” Ge means “valley” and henna means “Hinnom.” The Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, was an actual place. In fact, it was a site outside the ancient city of Jerusalem where apostate Israelites and followers of various Ba’als and Caananite gods sacrificed their children by fire. In the Hebrew tradition, it was deemed to be cursed.

In Jesus’ time, Gehenna was the city dump. Fires were kept burning there to consume the trash, and it’s where the dead bodies of criminals and the carcasses of animals were often thrown. Anybody Jesus was speaking to would have been familiar with Gehenna and its notorious reputation. And, due to Jewish religious tradition regarding the bloodiness of the valley’s history, Gehenna became synonymous with hellish circumstances. So, in Matthew, when Jesus asks the Pharisees how they will escape the sentence of Gehenna, he’s using a metaphor. Gehenna was a miserable, cursed place. And it was here, on Earth, not someplace beneath the Earth’s crust or up in the sky.

Jesus’ listeners would have immediately identified Gehenna with misery, and they would have understood that if they rejected God’s love and lived a life void of kindness and charity that their lives would be filled with torment.

What’s interesting about all this is that Jesus never equates hell to an un-Earthly place that people will go after they die if they don’t believe the right things or act the right way. And yet, millions of Christians believe in a fiery place where unholy souls spend an eternity in torment and anguish based on Jesus’ references to Jerusalem’s garbage dump. Millions of Christians are keen to note that homosexuals or Jews or Muslims will spend eternity in hell based on a metaphor. That seems…troubling.

Maybe it’s time to re-examine our perspective of hell. Maybe it’s time to think about how the hell most people identify with may have been constructed in order to control people through fear. Maybe it’s time to consider a different kind of hell, a hell that exists here and now when we turn away from love, when we act selfishly, when we feel in full force the heavy burden of guilt. Because that other hell, the hell I’m most familiar with, is really beginning to not make sense.

[Audacia]

I’ve noticed something sorely lacking when it comes to discussions about the divine: humility. While a number of people discussing faith or spirituality claim to admit that they may very well be wrong, very few actually act upon that claim. I’ve witnessed countless discussions about faith devolve into verbal sparring matches charged with sarcasm, hyperbole, and hurtful insults. Very few people step back to talk about their position, perspective, or belief with humility, and even fewer acknowledge that the “other side” may be right. I know this because I’m guilty of the same arrogance I witness all the time. The human mind wants to be right. It needs to be right. It takes incredible mental strength to fight that innate human desire to be right about everything. Talking about faith is tricky. It’s all too easy for us to discount what others are saying. We fall back upon baseless insults, comfortable with the idea that our particular belief or lack of thereof is correct. In reexamining my own faith, I am making an effort to discuss what I find to be true with humility, knowing that I may be completely wrong.

With that being said, I have discovered a viewpoint presented in Rob Bell’s book that I am particularly fond of. Rob talks about God being an energy present in everything in the universe. He describes moments where we feel incredible depth of feeling, moments where we step back and say, “This matters,” moments that send chills down our spines as examples of the divine energy that is God. He talks about God being with us, inside of us, and everywhere around us. Because, it seems, many of us think of God with limited knowledge of what exists outside of humanity. We think of God having human characteristics. We have created God in our own image. We fail to realize that God is spirit, that he or she or whatever God is lacks form or structure. This idea of what God is sounds a lot like the Force, I know. Yet if the divine truly exists, it makes the most sense to me that it exists as the energy behind everything that is felt, created, accomplished, and achieved.

One last point. In his book, Rob talks about how everyone, everywhere, possesses some sort of faith. That everyone, at some point, takes a leap of faith when deciding what it is that they believe to be true. I think that it’s important we as people acknowledge that we all seek truth. We all want to discover who or what is behind how the universe works. I want to keep that in mind as I continue my search for truth, because from that idea stems a certain degree of respect for all people and open-mindedness to new perspectives.

[Audacia]

“It’s one thing to stand in a lab coat with a clipboard, recording data about lips. It’s another thing to be kissed.” Well, I couldn’t agree more. I have finished Rob Bell’s book What We Talk About When We Talk About God and I have come away enlivened and refreshed. And small quips like that are what rejuvenated me while reading the book. We can try and pinpoint what we know or do not know about experiences we believe involve the divine. We can talk and talk and talk about God all we want and what this elusive divine being wants from us and what rules we must follow and what sacraments we must perform. And no matter how much we talk or what details we observe it is impossible to know anything about God’s love unless you really experience it. Rob uses another interesting example when discussing this topic in his book. He asks readers to imagine that after they read a review of an album someone asks them questions about that album. That individual asks what the songs sounded like and what the lyrics talked about. And he makes a keen point, that his readers could essentially answer all the questions about that album without ever hearing the songs. Being an avid fan of music, and a dedicated reader of Pitchfork, I could totally relate. We need to hear the songs. We need to listen and experience the profound emotional impact the songs can have.

Which brings me to another point. I am in love. Yes, I know. That sounds incredibly silly, childish, and even moronic. And yet, it’s true. I am desperately in love and I know it and it makes me really, really happy. And, one night when contemplating my faith and my spirituality and everything I have absorbed recently, I had a revelation. I was thinking about how and if I love this divine being we call God, when my mind began to wander, almost subconsciously. I caught myself thinking about the individual I love, and I stopped to marvel at what had just occurred. When contemplating my love for God my mind reminded me how much I love this individual. And I realized that what I have read and heard so many times before, that the love we have for others is directly related to our love for God, that that love is in fact the same love we have for God and that it comes from the same source, is true. Love is the energy that connects humans in the most fulfilling and rewarding way. Love is the source of all good things and good feelings and good nature. Love is, I happen to believe, God. It seems so cliché. It seems so run of the mill. And yet, I cannot help but think that it is so true.