May 5, Blog #7

I have arrived at a thin” place, here in Iona, a small island off the coast of Scotland, in the Inner Hebrides. In the late 500s, AD, saint Columba founded a monastery here which has been a center of learning and literacy and prayer for 1500 years. It is thought that the Book of Kells was created here in the 10th century and transported to Dublin to protect it from the frequent Viking raids. A “thin place” is one in which the spiritual world and the world of conventional reality are very near to each other, the veil is vey thin. It is isolated and very quiet, a good place to listen and reflect. Only 186 people live here year round. All I can hear is the corncrakes and the wheatears, two birds native to this island, and the sound of the ocean.

I have embarked upon this sabbatical because I needed a time to get reacquainted with myself and what is true. As Greta Garbo said, ” I vahnt to be aloone”. I have been doing the same basic things as a physician and family man for so long, with all my strength, that I seemed to have misplaced the ability to hear what/who/where/how to change to what is calling me now. I have a highly developed capacity to focus on what needs to be done. I am a master at screening out “distracting” inner and outer information in order to accomplish tasks. I am gifted in empathizing, intuiting, feeling with other suffering people. I find it difficult to make decisions with integrity about who I am becoming and what is true for me now, as I enter a new stage of life, eldering. I believe each of us is called to be generative, to share our gift, our wisdom with the next generation.

There is so much written and discussed about midlife transition and such resistance in our society to aging, that I have no clear model for how to discover how “to be” as opposed “to do” when the “puer”, young man’s hero’s journey no longer applies. My body does not allow me to continue my old ways of achieving, striving, going all out. It worked so well for the past 35-40 years….

Also, I am confused about God. My passion is to know and experience God as fully as possible in this human journey and to be a portal to the divine. For a long time I was attuned to the God of scripture, to the male, patriarchal God of the Christian churches. I studied and memorized scripture, taught Bible studies, led small groups, was chairman of parish education at the Lutheran church. It was a rich and edifying time as I raised a family.

However, along the way, I came to realize that the inerrancy of scripture was interpreted through humans who had their own biases and politics. At one point, justification from the pulpit of violence and militarism was so egregious that I felt physically nauseated and spiritually violated. I lost faith in the pastor, the human institutions that were supposed to be the “authority” to convey the Truth. Suddenly, in 2004, Pontius Pilate’s question “what is truth” became a critical issue for me. Who to trust?

What is this denominational business about anyway, but human division and strife? Is this what Jesus was about? The recurring question about “the lost” people of other faith traditions, or no faith arose to haunt me. Surely, the God who yearned for and celebrated the prodigal son, who searched for the one lost sheep, that not one should be lost, who told the story of the Good Samaritan, the woman at the well, etc and sent Paul to the “Gentiles” would not damn every Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, Zoroastrian, etc., and atheist. They were all His creation. And each of them had some wisdom, like the blind man and the elephant. They each searched for ultimate truth. His spark of life was in all of them. Fundamentalist Christians avowed they had the whole literal truth about God’s infinite mystery. And they tried to take power politics to legislate morality, while supporting war, capital punishment, and ignoring the plight of the poor, social justice, and the suffering ecosystem of the earth.

How to understand Jesus clear statement “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except by me”? Could it be that the presence of God, the “I AM”, is the way, truth, and life that Jesus spoke of; that Yahweh, Who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, “I AM WHO I AM” means the “I AM ” the “presence”, absolute Being, is the way, truth, and life? Jesus always spoke in parables. Taking this statement literally disenfranchises half of his beloved human creation.

Then, I began to see that “made in God’s image” must include women. I learned the history of human religion moved from matriarchy to patriarchy, from earth, body, feminine reverence to rejection of earth, body, feminine, the material world as sinful and inferior. This either/or dichotomy, some of God’s creation was good and some bad made no sense. If God is all, everything belongs and nothing is rejected. More on this later.

There are two ways to live your life
One as though nothing is a miracle,
The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

-Albert Einstein