When I was a kid in a sleepy little Jersey Shore town — Back then very isolated from the cultural or intellectual stimulation of New York and Philadelphia — I spent my Sunday mornings sitting very bored in our family's huge and oh so respectable conservative Presbyterian Church where I sat with my parents every Sunday in the same pew, and I don't remember ever feeling that I'd been awakened by something that was said, sensing some new awareness, feeling that my eyes had somehow been opened, feeling the excitement of any powerful truth or possibility.

I was just bored. And then one week I was drawn, instead, down the block to the VFW hall into the fervor of the Assembly of God, drawn into the Pentecostal strand of Fundamentalism, then off to its college in Springfield, Missouri, and briefly into its ministry — whooohooo, until its constricted world closed in around me, and cut me off from the evil world, but so much more disastrously, from myself, from my mind, from my best instincts and intuitions, from my finest spiritual capacities, from my own life truth.

But maybe you can imagine something else I found there — the fervor of what they called the presence of God, the Holy Spirit — the love they felt, and of which they were unashamed, toward what they hold to be Ultimate, at the Heart of Reality. They call it Jesus. I don't, not anymore. But I don't love it any less.

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Their experience was real, but they hung it on a set of unbelievable beliefs. My relationship with the Heart of Being couldn't be mediated through those beliefs or on the authority of bibles or churches. It had to be authentic and real and my own.

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When, at the beginning the 19th century, the new critical scholarship started asking critical questions of the Bible, some true believers felt threatened, and they came up with the Five Fundamentals that you have to believe in order to be a real Christian and gain salvation. Fundamentalism was born.
But when it comes to spiritual life — what really is fundamental?

I wish we could share —across across the divide of theology and dogma — a recognition of a common transcendent experience of the Heart of Being that we simply understand differently. This brings to mind countless conversations with fundamentalists when that didn't happen.

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There are these moments when you see beyond the surface of things; you see the inherent glory of being.
You are lifted out of the myopia of daily routine, deadlines, ambitions, fears, resentments, habitual ways of seeing — and now you're seeing with the eyes of wonder beyond the surface, and you're seeing a vast horizon, and you are filled with a luminosity, the light brighter than a thousand suns, and you see the glory of Being, the shining radiance of the Universe of life, and you are drenched in liquid love and lifted to a higher quality of consciousness and bliss. Whew! What was that?

Was it Jesus? the Buddha? the Self Absolute? Atman-Brahman? the "ground luminescence" the Buddhists talk about? the Ground of Being that the theologian Tillich spoke about? the Shekinah of mystical Judaism? Emerson's Over-soul? Is that what it was?

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But here's the tricky part: profound spiritual experiences are available to anyone — it's how you interpret that experience. The interpretation we lay on reality creates our next reality, and we will interpret it according to the stage of our personal spiritual development. And there are better and worse ways to do it. Samuel Johnson wrote that it's not really the Bible where people get their beliefs, but from the interior spiritual condition within themselves — then they make the Bible mean that. Theodore Parker said the god you believe in just reflects your own state of spiritual attainment.

New, higher waves of consciousness open up when we feel the limitations of where we are, when we begin to feel that we're suffocating there, when we have to move farther in our journey, urgently must evolve. And we as individuals develop through exactly these same stages as the whole human race does, beginning as infants and advancing until we stop or get stuck somewhere.

Someone with a mature, highly-developed religious perspective can even find ways to extract deeper meanings that lurk in the old beliefs, rituals, and myths of the past. But you don't need them.

But what about that Fundamentalist friend, rapt in ecstasy with his Jesus. Will he rejoice when you tell hiim about your own spiritual experience, your transported vision of beauty, possibly with no Jesus, died and resurrected or otherwise? Will he embrace you as a friend who shares the highest of treasures but describes it differently?

Actually, no. He will be quite convinced that your experience of spirit cannot be real, because it says, right in Acts 4:12 — we must be saved "by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth," and "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." In that Assembly of God, we had that verse memorized. Plain enough. Bible says so. Leaves you out.

You just think you've had an authentic spiritual experience. But your true-believer friend knows better, yessir. You must be possessed of demons. Or maybe just deluded. But if they have a spiritual experience, they take it as miraculous proof of their beliefs.

I remember that, and I remember what happened when I began to question points of doctrine, when I began to question the damn-near-absolute authority of the preacher. And then, a funny thing. That overwhelming love I felt on my first visit? No more. Gone now. Now I was an agent of Satan. Now I was to be despised and shunned and avoided.

I understand why. That fundamentalist has entered the safe enclave of the saved in the midst of a wicked world. All else is demonic deceit. For him there's far too much ambiguity, too much danger, if the train isn't running down the steel rails of an infallible Bible and infallible church's interpretation of the Bible. Or Koran or whatever. He wants the world neatly tied up in the hands of a God he can understand, who's a lot like him only older and bigger and smarter — and in control of everything.

Do we really want to put our trust in the cosmology of those who lived several thousand years ago? I don't. —To enter the life of the Spirit is to be engaged in your own evolution and with it the advance of human consciousness. There is no standing-still stagnation here.

And religion will either be a lock on the past, or an engine of the evolution of consciousness — as our faith must be.

And sometimes the world, and our country, seem to be run by a freeze-dried state of some primitive consciousness with all of its barbarity, fears, superstitions, and mythology.

And that can be dangerous. Especially for heretics, infidels, women, gay people, just for instance.
In Iran, and now, after the American invasion, in Iraq, gay people who had previously enjoyed a growing freedom, are fleeing or going into hiding, while women have lost the rights and freedoms they once enjoyed. There are fundamentalists who would do the same in America, if they could.

But under the delusion that you're doing God a favor, you don't have to take responsibility for what you do or the choices you make. And here is one great appeal of fundamentalism: St. Paul made me do it, the Koran or the Bible told me to do it. And you don't have to bear the burden that's always carried by that free mind that Channing was talking about — the burden of being completely, 100 per cent responsible for your choices and deeds.

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So — there you are with your fundamentalist friend.

Both he and you are capable of transcendent religious experiences of spirit — he through a special relationship with Jesus, — and you without any such special means at all. Maybe you were just meditating or deep in contemplation. Maybe it just settled over you, in a moment of crisis, or just going about your business, looking out at Nature, whatever.

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Our experience of reality is shaped and bent around our interpretation of it, our expectations and beliefs about it. And the problem begins with one spectacularly bad idea:

presumptive authority

authority you just presume, cannot question, dare not doubt.

Why was I — why are so many people — willing to believe the unbelievable? How did we give it such authority? What really is fundamental? We want to keep quoting our Bibles and Korans, but maybe it's time we turn to our own higher spiritual capacities and stop harking back to the conceptions and convictions of a distant and primitive past.

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Suppose it's something else that's fundamental. Suppose we start somewhere else. Supose the fundamental thing is as close as your breath and as vast as the Kosmos. Suppose your being is an expression of Being Itself, not something separate from it. Suppose your particular life-story is the story of Life Itself.

Suppose breathing through you is the very Spirit that gives life to everything, that is the essence of all that is. Suppose roaring at the heart of you are the same powers of creation that brought the Universe into existence 14 billion years ago. Suppose all that has now found its highest expression in the very consciousness that is sitting here this morning contemplating all this, and making choices?

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There is a difference between a religion of presumptive authority that is true because it is true, everybody knows it's true and nobody dares say it isn't true; — and one of immediate, unfolding truth recognized by something deep inside us. Emerson stated it well in his magnificent, heretical Address to the Harvard divinity students:

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every [one], and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

Or as the great Krishnamurti used to say, don't believe the speaker. Suppose you start with your journey, your experience of life, the truth of your life. The experience of Spirit, or transcendence — passed through the fire of life-experience and of critical thought. Suppose those things are the fundamentals with which you start.

My spiritual quest forced me past the boundaries of my old certainties. And it taught me a priceless lesson. When, at that evangelical seminary north of Boston, I came home to myself and what I found true in myself, — I found myself alone. After publishing a defense of gay people in the seminary newspaper, of which I was editor—I'd sit down in the cafeteria and the table would clear out around me.

That may sound awful but it wasn't. It was a real gift that I had nobody to turn to. I had to find out that what I needed, I already had. It's always, already here, in the heart and soul of us. Nobody else can give us that or take it from us.

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That line from Emerson: Find true in me. Sometimes when we won't listen, Truth speaks to us in our dreams. I had expended a lot of life-energy arguing down my own doubts about the presumptive authority I'd always believed. And then I had a dream, which I recorded in my journal this way:

I am touring the city where I shall be working for the Church. Now we come to the Church, and I am given my housing. A bed right in the cathedral sanctuary. I lay there in the night, looking up at . . . a vast, cavernous dome. It looks like the vault of heaven, a sea of crystal glass, ornate and grand. Having nowhere else to go, I lay there, I keep looking, contemplating the dome above. It's old; the bronze needs polishing. The crystal glass that covers the entire ceiling is turning color. Now I notice the cracks. It is going to collapse of its own weight and I will die. I am terrified. I run from the cathedral.

Maybe it was the feeling of suffocation where I was that drew me across the threshhold — because sometimes we break through into a higher level of consciousness only after we've faced the limits of the place where we've been, only after it gets bad enough where we are.

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That imaginary fundamentalist friend: I would like to ask him:

Do you believe that the Universe is really ruled by a God who, having created a terribly flawed creature, is prepared to toss the vast majority of humanity — who don't believe the right things, adopt the right theology — into an eternal trash-heap, to suffer forever?

What kind of god would that be? Would you worship something like that? What does it take to offend your sense of morality? The idea of a god like that began to offend mine. People can change; they can grow. I know. I was helped on my way by a friend who would challenge my thinking, but who never lived to see the fruit of his efforts. But his challenging words seeped into my consciousness and did their work.

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When you begin with the fundamentals of your own life-truth, you learn not some authoritative story on life according to Abraham or the Twelve Disciples, but the reality of your own story, listening, watching for the Spirit, the Divine, the Sacred, there. When I fled that crumbling old cathedral of my former religious life I found that the Spirit was still there, wherever I went, because the Heart and Ground of Being, Spirit, is always already there. It's impossible to be separated from it because there is nowhere where it is not and you are a manifestation of it.

You start with your story And then you learn that your story is everyone's. And you are united with the whole world of life.

It's as though each life is a deep well, and way down there way below the surface there flows a deep underground river uniting all the individual wells.

And then we are not looking at life only from our own personal experience, but through wider and wider circles of life and humanity. And then we might imagine what it is to be poor, without healthcare, tortured, intimidated and controlled by a faraway power. And then we might have the moral imagination that can see both the consequences of greed and arrogance, and the consequences of those actions of ours that flow from our worst impulses; — and imagine, too, our highest and noblest possibilities and the kind of world we might create.

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A higher quality of consciousness, beyond our egos and beyond our narrow conceptions — a world-embracing, a Kosmos-embracing consciousness — awaits, and it calls to those who will hear, and turn to it.

That sense of the presence of Spirit — I've felt it in the midst of people gathered by that fundamental spiritual impulse that is in us. Maybe you feel it here. I think of hours spent in gatherings of people, sometimes wordlessly, but electrically alive with Spirit. That is what I wish for us.

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Surely it's our work here and it's our calling to nurture as rich and fervent a spiritual life as you'll ever find in a fundamentalist revival. Our religion and our spiritual life is first a recognition of ourselves as part and parcel of the one unfolding life of all that is, and it may as well be passionate. It may as well involve our whole soul in the fire of its burning. It may as well transform us. The world's future depends on it.

If we dare let it happen, unembarrassed, unapologetic — a spiritual revolution will have been set in motion that no reactionary force on earth can stay or overcome. It would be the most magnificent energy ever yet set loose upon the earth.

Copyright 2011 by F. Jay Deacon.