🚨Welcome back! It’s been a while since I last wrote so excuse my rusty writing. A lot has gone down in the last month. My gradual turn towards Christianity and its wisdom being one of them. I have a lot to write about in the coming weeks and months, so make sure you subscribe to the newsletter to get some kickass writing ig :)
🎧 Song Pairing: Hear My Prayer (O for the wings of a dove)
📖 Reading Time: ~6 minutes.
The Exodus Of The Son
“And he said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living.
And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.”
Nearly a decade back I turned against the doctrine that I was raised in. I stopped calling myself a Christian. To me, it seemed like it was a long time coming.
How could I possibly listen to a 2000+ year-old book and live my life based on it? What did they know about the world today? What did they know about all the atrocities the Church would commit? What did they know about the corruption that had spread through the keepers of the doctrine?
Were these sins forgiven just because they believed Christ was their salvation? Were their crimes void because they confessed to another sinner behind a mesh screen? That’s a fucked up justice system if you asked 13-year-old me.
What would God say to all the beautiful minds that burned at the stake for ‘heresy’? When all they did were make strides in scientific thought. What would God say to all the children that were assaulted by the leaders of the Church? All the people cheated out of their money in the name of this religion?
Growing up, I had nothing but love for this beautiful religion and its traditions. I read the book religiously. I loved sitting by myself in a church and absorbing spiritual nourishment. I loved the idea of an old, bearded man in the sky above, looking down at me with love.
But, this childlike curiosity toward learning The Word soon turned into horror. The deeper I dug, the more it didn’t make sense. The math wasn’t mathing.
So, I looked to other people for questions and guidance. So, that turned out to be a mistake. Questions were shushed. All the role models I before had were touched by evil too.
I stopped looking. I turned vengeful. Logic and science explained the world around us plenty. I didn’t need a battered, old, and boring book to explain anything. Religion was a curse on this planet.
I was no longer a Christian. Having been born and brought up in a Christian household, this was quite a heavy load to bear.
This was my cross to bear.
“We're the middle children of history, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives.”
The Trinity Within Us
“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
For years after this decision, there was intense spiritual torment. It was a lesson hard learned but science doesn’t soothe souls. Gratitude, faith, hope, and love do.
I believe we are multi-dimensional creatures. Somehow we’re not just our bodies or even our consciousness. We’re more than that. There’s more to us in ways that cannot be explained.
Christianity talks about this a lot as well— We’re made up of three parts.
The body— Our physical self.
The soul— I like to think of this as our consciousness.
Finally and arguably the most important, the spirit. It’s the component of transcendence. We’re in some unfathomable way connected to a bigger whole. What that is, I don’t know.
We try to ignore it and run away from it. But, it’s right there. Nudging you and looking out for you. People call it Infinite Intelligence, Collective Consciousness, or Guardian angels.
It’s the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine. Sometimes, it’s warm as a mother’s embrace. It wraps you with the safety and comfort of the womb. Sometimes, it stirs you to action. It facilitates growth and strength, like a responsible but loving father would.
Yet, we go all our lives nourishing our bodies (a little too much), and our minds. We seek bodily and mental stimulation while our spirit goes unnourished. Is it because we don’t know it exists? Or, is it because we’re rebels at heart? We fight every decision of our spiritual parents.
Why? Because they love us in a way we SHOULD be loved, not the way we want them to.
So, I ran. It was an indefinite sprint on the universe’s hamster wheel. I thought I was making progress when I hadn’t grown or learned anything at all.
We are quite stubborn and testy creatures. We demand proof. We demand testable hypotheses. As I was reading the Bible the other day, I read something interesting.
When Jesus went into the desert for 40 days to be tempted by the devil, the devil plays the role of a skeptic. He challenges Jesus to turn stone into bread and jump off cliffs because God is looking out for him.
But, what Jesus says is quite interesting. He says, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
Not for God to save face in case he can’t help you, but rather for you. He may show himself, but it’s never in the way that you want him to.
We want to see a bearded, old man appear with harps and angels singing to confirm OUR idea of God. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s not how it works.
After years of being humbled, here’s what I know— We’re only human, with a sprinkle of spirit in there. It can’t and it won’t ever ‘make sense.’ But, you know when you are touched by it. You know when the sprinkle of spirit has awoken.
Am I there yet? It would be prideful and stupid for me to say I am. But, the journey has begun. There is a new and more meaningful cross to bear now— A spiritual one.
How did this all get started for me? That’s a story for another day. First, let’s talk about a fun little game we play.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
The Eternal Game Of Chinese Whispers
“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
In case you haven’t noticed, communication is hard. Language is such a convenient tool that we use to make sense of our reality and share it with others. But, it’s incomplete. It serves its purpose of sharing knowledge and information. But it’s so uni-dimensional.
Malow’s hammer or the law of the instrument is a cognitive bias we all share. In simple terms, it’s over-reliance on a tool we are familiar with. Language is one of them.
We experience, process it, encode it into alphabets and syllables, and speak them. But, somewhere along this process a lot of information is lost. Articulation is a BIG problem. Your experiences are only as good as you can articulate them.
Couple that with the fact that nobody is really listening to one another anymore. We’re only waiting for our turn to speak. We hear what we want to hear and tune out the rest.
In every sentence that we speak, we are playing a futile game of Chinese whispers. But, it’s not just articulation and our listening skills that has flaws. It goes much deeper than that.
Recently, a few of my friends and I had a quasi-spiritual experience. And, a core problem we were obsessing over through the night is, how we communicate this to others. Do we record ourselves, or do we write in a journal, what the fuck do we do?
We have a good hold over language when it comes to talking about physical sensations. Body— Check.
We have a decent hold over language to piece together complex strings of ideas. Soul— Check.
But, we lack the vocabulary to even begin to deconstruct spiritual experiences. How do we communicate anything when we’re spaghetti-ed across three planes of reality?
We need a tool working in synchronicity with language.
Language brings the logical, thinking aspect to the table. This second tool needs to communicate emotion and feeling well. With the two put together, in a coalition, they form a third tier of communication. Words that move us, words that make us think, and words that we hold in high regard.
Even with this second tool we only begin to scratch the surface of wording spiritual experiences. But, it’s the best instrument we have as humans and you bet we’ve used it to its absolute limit.
What is this second tool? It’s one that my grandma wielded very well. It shaped my world growing up and it shaped yours too— Stories.
“Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”