As I begin this journey of blogging — sharing my thoughts and reflections — it seems appropriate that I offer some insight into where I am coming from.  So, here goes.

Over the course of my life’s journey, I have been fascinated by how our perceptions or beliefs shape and form our experience of the world.  And what I have found to be incredibly intriguing is how often the worldviews and viewpoints that determine the fundamental structures of our belief systems are mostly unconscious.  For the most part, they are inherited viewpoints received without question or reflection. 

The reality is that how we frame and perceive life dictates how we will engage life.  So, our worldview and perceptions have enormous consequences — both individually and collectively.  Worldviews and beliefs are not written in stone and handed down from heaven.  They are human constructs — finite and contextual expressions of our collective understanding of the Ideal, the Absolute, the Infinite, God.  Therefore, becoming conscious of our inherited worldviews and beliefs is essential to our individual and collective ability to develop, grow and engage life beneficially.  

And this challenge of consciously engaging life is the heart of our spiritual journey.  When you consider the many stories within the Bible, we begin to see that the consistent task posed by encounters with God, the Divine, is letting go of our inherited and established worldviews and beliefs.  Have you ever noticed how just about everyone who is called by God must leave all that is familiar, habitual, and established?  Look at the story of Abram and Sarai (who become Abraham and Sarah).  Abram and Sarai are part of a prosperous clan and tribe from the land of Ur.  Their call from God is to leave all that they know — their family, their clan, their culture, their geography — and go to “the land that I will show you.”  In other words, they must leave all that they know for the unknown (and without definitive directions).

Think about the Israelites leaving Egypt for the “Promised Land.”  Although the Israelites were in fact slaves and therefore their life was less than idyllic, their life was their life — it was familiar, established, known.  And like us, it is hard to give up what is familiar and known for the unknown — even when our current circumstances are less than ideal.  Despite our modern interpretation that the plagues were directed at the Egyptians, the purpose of the plagues was to force the Israelites to take action by venturing into the wilderness — the unfamiliar and unknown.   And the long time spent in the wilderness was not because Moses didn’t know how to navigate and wouldn’t ask for directions or because the people had to be punished.  The time in the wilderness was to afford the people the time to let go of their longing for how it used to be — remembering “the fish we used to eat for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” in Egypt.  Until the people could let go of their nostalgic reminiscence of Egypt, they would never be able to embrace the Promised Land and perceive “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Even the Christian stories reinforce this same idea.  Think of the baptism of Jesus.  Immediately after he has a very heady experience of being declare the beloved of God, we are told that the Spirit drove him into the Wilderness.  This is not a polite invitation or suggestion.  He is compelled to leave all that he has known and valued and believed and go into the unknown and be tempted — that is, to have his assumptions, values and beliefs challenged.  And the use of forty days is not describing actual, linear time.  Forty is an idiom for “a long time.”  In other words, for as long as was necessary for him to let go of his inherited worldviews and beliefs and become transformed or enlightened. 

Similarly, we see the necessity of letting go of strongly held beliefs with the calling of Saul.  In his zealousness to protect God (which is nothing more than his unquestioned ideas about God), he leaves the familiarity and safety of Jerusalem as he ventures to Damascus.  On his journey, everything that he has held to be true is suddenly brought into question resulting in him “becoming like a blind man.”  It is only after he sequesters himself that he is able to become open and experiences transformation or enlightenment.  The story says that when Ananias (someone outside of his religious sect) prays for him “immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.”  In other words, the story is reminding us of how our worldviews, perceptions and beliefs inhibit our ability to see clearly and engage our world righteously (as opposed to self-righteously).    

The stories of our sacred tradition insist that our transformation or enlightenment requires a willingness to let go of our inherited assumptions and beliefs — even, and perhaps especially, our religious beliefs.  And because our assumptions and beliefs are so ingrained and thus mostly unconscious, we must consciously choose to remove ourselves from our familiar and comfortable thought patterns and actively question and assess the worldviews and beliefs we have inherited.  The spiritual journey, in other words, compels us to be open and vulnerable — willing to risk transformation. 

And this is the basis for so much of the tension intuited by the many seekers who identify themselves as being “spiritual but not religious.”  Contrary to our modern assumption, religion and spirituality are not antithetical.  Spirituality is what enlivens our religious understanding — making it relevant and life giving.  And a religion devoid of reflection and consciousness is no longer valid or beneficial.    

We are living in an unprecedented and exciting time — a time when humanity is reawakening to the reality of the wholeness of life.  The reemergence of spirituality within our awareness is challenging religion’s rigid assumptions that life is dichotomous.  Spirituality is reaffirming our intuition that life is whole; that life is holy.  Life is not comprised of competing dualities but complementary expressions of the whole.  Life is where the Infinite and the finite meet; the Eternal and the temporal merge; the sacred and the secular join; the holy and the mundane amalgamate; Spirit and matter fuse; and the Divine and human unify.   Life — our life — is a whole, the very place where “heaven is joined to earth and earth to heaven.”