Unbelievable....

To embrace life, to increase love, to have the courage to be - 

these, for me, are the doorways through which

I walk into the mystery of God..

This God is real to me

and Jesus is still my doorway into this reality....

I walk eagerly into this life-centered God experience....

I bear witness to the faith that leads me and the whole world

to live fully, love wastefully and be all that we can be.

 - Bishop John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable (2018)

For many, many years now, Bishop John Shelby Spong has been sharing his unique experience of God with fellow human beings of every stripe and type. To some, he is a heretic: someone who refuses to swallow whole the orthodoxies and dogma of the Christian church with which he has been affiliated for more than six decades. To others, he is a hero: someone whose willingness to wrestle with the challenges of life and faith has encouraged the development of new and vibrant pathways to God. Having studied Jack's work and having come to know him a bit in recent years, I'm definitely in the latter camp. He is both my hero - personally and professionally - and my guiding theological light, as his unique approach to faith and spirituality has encouraged me to develop my own, which has, in turn, led to a profoundly abundant spiritual life that I could not have imagined even a decade ago.

Don't get me wrong, I also believe that Jack's a heretic, but in the very best possible way: he has long evidenced the courage and conviction to question the oh-so-human dogma and practice of institutional Christianity … and in this speaking of the truth to power he has both enraged and unsettled the church's hierarchy and reached and reclaimed many of its ostensible adherents. I am one of these whose spirituality has been encouraged and developed by Jack Spong's wisdom and piercing insight, and because of this I have now found both a strength of affiliation with the Christian church and a personal theology that I never before thought possible. 

Thank you, Jack, both for your example as a heretic and for your encouragement for me and many others to try it! I am not now a member of the Church Alumni Association (as he slyly describes the Christians who've left this institution in droves in the past generation) because of Jack: thanks to him, I was able to see a place for myself within the Church, rather than outside of it, and have been benefiting from and contributing meaningfully through this affiliation for many years now. I'm proud to be both a heretic - which for me means that I've developed an idiosyncratically resonant personal theology that doesn't correspond fully (or event that much) to the institutional church's teachings - and, now, the Senior Warden of my Episcopal church.

But even more than I appreciate Jack as a heretic, I revere him as a person and a trailblazing religious professional. In fact, his theology is at the core of mine now, for which I am indescribably grateful. And as I studied the development of his theology, I was also introduced to other theological eminences whose insights have illuminated  and elevated my spiritual path. Other than Jack, three of my greatest theological influences are Bishop John A.T. Robinson, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the first two of whom have also had an especially profound influence on the evolution of Bishop Spong's theology. Cobbled together in an idiosyncratically meaningful way, their insights have led to a simple, three-pronged faith that has been profoundly life-affirming for me:

First, though I consider myself a Christian, I don't believe that this particular faith is the only path to God, nor does it exclusively have all of the 'right' answers in the spiritual domain. (In fact, to me, the Church is a decidedly human institution - which isn't inherently a bad thing as long as we don't get this twisted - while God alone is divine.) Accordingly, I have studied, benefited from and incorporated insights from multiple faith traditions, especially, in my case, Taoism and Buddhism. So, in reality, I'm really a Christian-Taoist-Buddhist, which might be a little hard for the folks in the Baptist church that I grew up in to wrap their heads around, but it works beautifully for me.

Second, I choose to be Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ's example is worthy of emulation by us all. I no longer buy the dogma that He's the only son of God, or, necessarily, that he was even Divine in the sense of being especially aligned with God. (Truth be told, I believe that God is in all of us and that Jesus just did a better job - the best job ever, actually - at reflecting this than we average humans do.) In fact, following Bishop Spong's teaching, I believe that Jesus reflected the insights of early Christian Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, who (in modern language) observed that the glory of God is a human person fully alive. To me, Jesus is one of history's finest examples of what it means to be fully human and fully alive. I consider myself a Christian because I hope to live into His example ever more lovingly and impactfully every day, and I accept that His standard of embodying and sharing love constantly and with all is as simple as it is profoundly difficult to live. Every day, I fall short in myriad ways, but I am lifted by the belief that Jesus' love compels me to pick myself up, dust myself off and try even harder to be the better person that I am capable of being. I take it as one of God's and life's delicious ironies that the simplest and yet most profound way to live is also the hardest.

Third, based on these two preceding spiritual principles, my guiding philosophy comes straight from Bishop Spong: I believe that I'm called by God to live fully, love wastefully and be(come) all that I am capable of being every day of my earthly life. I further believe that if I am able to live in this way, more moments of my life will resonate in ways that are eternal in the sense that their import and impact will be forever felt. So, perhaps another irony of my faith is that while I no longer believe in Heaven and Hell as I was taught them in my youth - meaning, plainly, that there is no physical life after my earthly death - I do believe that we can live eternally in the here and now, in this one and only earthly life, and Jesus' example is my proof: though He is no longer with us physically, the way in which He lived His earthly life is so profound an example that we feel His presence to this day (and even define the way that we measure time by it). The eternal life that I hope to live is like His: that long after I'm gone physically, the love that I shared and the contributions that I made will be resonant in the lives of others and especially, hopefully, in those of my loved ones and their progeny.

So, in this Spirit, I leave you with the profound theology of Bishop Spong and pray that you, too, will find your spiritual being immeasurably enriched and your spiritual journey lovingly illuminated and elevated by it:

I cannot tell you who God is or what God is.

No one can do that.

That is not within the capability of any human mind.

All I can do is tell you how I believe I have experienced God.

God and my experience of God are not the same.

…

I believe I have experienced God as the Source of Life. ...

If God is the Source of Life,

then the only way I can appropriately worship God

is by living fully.

In the process of embracing the fullness of life,

I bear witness to the reality of the God who is the Source of Life.

I believe I have experienced God as the Source of Love.

Love is the power that enhances life. ...

If God is the Source of Love,

then the only way I can worship God

is by loving "wastefully"....

By "wasteful" love I mean the kind of love

that never stops to calculate whether the object of its love

is worthy to be its recipient.

It is love that never stops to calculate deserving.

It is love that loves not because love has been earned.

It is in the act of loving "wastefully" that I believe I make God visible.

Finally, I believe I experience God,

in the words of my greatest theological mentor,

Reformed German theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965),

as the Ground of Being. ...

If God is the Ground of Being,

then the only way I can worship God

is by having the courage to be all that I can be;

and the more deeply I can be all that I can be,

the more I can and do make God visible.

So the reality of God to me is discovered

in the experience which compels me to

"live fully, to love wastefully and

to have the courage to be all that I can be."

May we all live so well and eternally....