Thinking Back on my Spiritual Odyssey Part 3

 So far in this journey, we have talked about symbolism, worship music, and other things.  Now it is time to try to tie this all together somehow, and we will see how many more parts to the story can do just that. 

My 40 years of faith journey has been, well, interesting.  Most of what I am talking about in the past two parts of this story took place in roughly the first 15 years.  As I settled into my 30s, I began to get somewhat comfortable in my spirituality.  At that point, I had been received into the Catholic Church, and a large percentage of my earlier zeal had more or less morphed into something else - contentment and a sort of religious routine.  But, over the years I have often had times where I missed the earlier zeal of my youth, and it seemed that despite ways to recapture it, often it was just something that was a brain fart and it didn't go beyond that.  Oh, I still found things to occupy my spiritual curiosity though.  In the late 2000s, I went on a sort of crusade against some new disturbing trends like the "Emerging Church" movement and this whole Purpose-Driven Life stuff that became vogue during those years - Rick Warren was considered to be the most influential Evangelical Protestant, and he was talking about essentially "remaking" church in his own image, and I found some of what he was doing to be iconoclastic and frankly disturbing.  While it really had no bearing on my newfound Catholic faith in all honesty, I took a strong interest in it because on the rare occasion I visited an Evangelical church of some sort, it was like landing on an alien planet - gone was the Evangelicalism of the 1980s and 1990s, and it was replaced with glorified rock bands, dank and dark sanctuaries, and ministers giving self-esteem lectures rather than discipling their people.  Let me give some background into this as it did evolve over several decades.

The Purpose-Driven/Emerging Church movement had roots that extended back to the late 1980s and early 1990s "Seeker-Friendly" movement.   The main architect of this at the time was a megachurch pastor in Chicago named Bill Hybels, and it also had a more radical expression in the work of James Rutz, an Evangelical author who in the early 1990s wrote a screed of iconoclasm called The Open Church.  Originally curious, I had bought a copy of this book as a young Pentecostal minister, as at the time I thought maybe it would be something similar to Bill Hamon's book The Eternal Church, which in reality was a revolutionary book to me as in my early days as a young Christian I had gotten somewhat involved with Hamon's movement called Christian International, or CI.  CI was a new type of Charismatic group that began teaching about the restoration of prophets and apostles, and although at times they tended to get a little controversial, I found what they said to be intriguing.  I am going to talk more about that shortly, but getting back to the original discussion, James Rutz and Bill Hamon were as different as night from day.  The thesis of Rutz was that the Church had to be utterly destroyed and rebuilt in an image he envisioned of the first-century Church, which in all honesty was very wrong.  Let's talk about that a minute.

James Rutz was into destroying the identity of Christianity to reshape it in his own image, and this was problematic.  For one thing, and as I would learn more once I finally became Catholic, his view of the ancient Church was somewhat skewered.  He wanted a "church" that only met in houses, with no clergy, no sacraments, and not even any discipleship of any type.  He did not openly say that in that abomination of a book he wrote, but he didn't have to - he was a radical.  His version of Christianity was like Quakerism on steroids, and it was not even identifiable as a church.  While Rutz wrote this in the early 1990s, and it thankfully was largely dismissed then (nowadays, people have forgotten him in all honesty, and the response from many of my Evangelical friends when I bring his name up is "James who??).  But, in the late 1990s, a more slickly packaged version of the same thing hit the market, that being Southern Baptist pastor Rick Warren's book The Purpose Driven Church.  Although in about 25 years Warren too would only be a historical footnote, his book caused something, a paradigm shift in how Evangelicals "did church," including throwing out the organ and piano, replacing it with a bad rock band, and then also cutting out the so-called "judgemental" aspects of the Bible because they might "offend" someone.  Rick Warren's approach was essentially bringing a Hillary Clintonesque version of political correctness into the sacred space.  Some Catholics were affected by this, but thankfully it never gained any significant ground in the Catholic Church except for maybe a few suspect rogue Jesuits who were theologically liberal anyway. Unfortunately, from Warren things would go downhill, as then people such as Rob Bell, Doug Padgett, Brian McLaren, and others would create the "Emerging Church" movement, which caused even more problems because now theological heresy (including stuff like universalism, as evidenced by Bell's book Love Wins) was being openly flaunted.  That would last until around 2015 or so, when most of those guys too became bylines and their work had been accomplished.  Evangelical Protestantism in America was severely weakened by all this, although other factors (the major televangelist scandals in the late 1980s for instance) also played into that too.  But, the damage was done.  One area that this hit hard was the social influence of Evangelicalism.

For many of us who grew up in the 1980s, it was the time when Evangelicals had a wonderful politically-active presence.  There were great cultural warriors such as Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and others who took on such trends as a growing concern with the moral issues in entertainment, abortion, the vocal LGBT movement (which wasn't called that then - it was just "gay rights," but still evil), and strong pro-Israel support.  Evangelicals then were writing books, they were organized, and thanks to the sympathetic support of President Reagan, they achieved a level of influence in culture that they would never have since. While many good Catholics were also part of this, in the 1980s and early 1990s most Catholics were still apolitical and thought the Religious Right was their enemy - they feared Evangelicals trying to convert them, and they had a more nuanced approach to social issues then.  Thankfully, 30 years later that would change as Catholics began to find their voice. With the clergy sex scandals of the early 2000s taking a toll on the Catholic Church, many Catholics began to address serious issues and by the end of that decade, the pro-life movement was largely made up of orthodox Catholics rather than Evangelicals - the latter had essentially gone "squish," as many of the old stalwarts and cultural warriors of the Evangelical movement were dying off, and the Rick Warrens and Rob Bells were taking them over too fast.  The lack of moorings in their religious practice led to many Evangelicals also becoming compromised on social issues, to the point that soon a new term was floating - "Evangelical Left."  The Presidency of Obama further weakened Evangelicals, and in their place a number of orthodox Catholics stepped up, and the new face of opposition to secularism was not Jerry Falwell, but rather people like Cardinal Burke, Fr. Frank Pavone, and others who took a Biblical stand for truth.  While there are still liberal holdouts in the Church - unfortunately the late Pope Francis was one - it shows nonetheless that it is Catholics who are now on the front lines of the culture wars, and many Evangelicals now have shrank back to their pods and now are content to sit in their cavernous dark megachurches sipping sanctified knockoffs of Starbucks while being slowly deafened by rock bands playing "worship music."  That little history lesson brings me back to my story now.

I became a Christian at the age of 16 in 1986, and as I went off to college at a small Baptist school in Graceville, FL, a couple of years later, I began to take my faith very seriously.  In the beginning I started off being more "mainstream" in my faith - conservative theologically but somewhat liberal politically, although at that time I was not sure what that meant.  To me then, being "liberal" just meant you were inspired by Martin Luther King and you didn't want a bunch of rich oligarchs pushing a selfish brand of capitalism on you. It was the Cold War era then still (although at the tail-end of it) and most of us were still anti-Communist - we knew the stark contrast between the free West and the oppressive Soviet Bloc then, and we were also the generation that saw the Berlin Wall come down as well as a number of courageous Chinese students standing against Communist tyranny in Tianmen Square.  Being "liberal" to me then did not mean being anti-American or pro-communist at all - it meant enjoying good music, being well-read, and not judging people based on race or economic status.  To me, those were naturally Christian values, so it was not too contradictory at all to hold to those and a conservative theological position.  As I was to find out later though, I was perhaps a true conservative then, and I was never part of the ideological Left - I was just a decent person who wanted a fair society and it had no bearing on a person what their skin color was.  I also considered myself more "progressive" then because I loved classic jazz and good books, and my own lower-income background made me a sort of crusader for the "common man."  All of that was what I defined as "liberal" then but in reality it was perhaps the best of conservatism. And to be honest, I found out that many of the so-called "liberal" values I had then were actually opposed by actual ideological Leftists, and that was a revelation. So, I was "right" from the beginning more or less!

My early development as a new Christian was an exercise in making a lot of things fit together that often I was told by some didn't fit - for instance, could a devout Christian listen to Frank Sinatra? And, later, how does a Christian recognize Israel's right to exist while at the same time having a level of solidarity with Christian minorities in the Middle East, many of whom I was later to find out were not exactly fond of Israel?  For a long time in my early years as a Christian, I sort of put my musical interests - collecting vintage big band recordings - on hold as I threw myself into my newfound faith.  I was teaching a Sunday School class at age 16, serving on the local church council at age 17, and preaching in churches by age 19.  I also got involved in denominational leadership too, from attending Baptist (and later Foursquare) conventions in my late teens and early 20s, to later serving as a lay Eucharistic Minister in both the Anglican and later Catholic traditions.  I was a young man with a lot of big ideas then - I wanted to somehow synthesize all I was learning into a Bible study series, and it was frustrating because at that time it was pre-internet and I had limited access to technology.  It was considered a huge deal in those days to just have a typewriter in all honesty, and I did have one - first it was an old manual typewriter that stuck on keys, but later I got myself an electric typewriter and was able to type out a bunch of old sermon notes and other things.  It wasn't until 1998 that I discovered the internet, and we would not get a personal home computer until 2001.  But, all that led to some other things in my journey.

The new exposure to technology opened up a lot of doors for me between the years of 2000 and 2011, and it was during that time I began to solidify some ideas into something more tangible.  Although I had started keeping a personal written journal regularly in 1996, and later I began to write down my life story, it was the internet that changed a lot.  In my first 10 years of having an actual home computer, I began to do something new - I discovered both social media and blogging, and for the first time I could get my ideas out to a wider audience.  My first exposure to social media was a site called Bebo in 2006, which was a less-sophisticated version of MySpace then.  Within a year or two, a new platform was rolled out called Facebook, and I got invited by a friend to be on there in 2008.  My early attempts at writing entailed "story" posts on Facebook, and I still have a collection of those that spanned two years until I found out I could have my own blogging platform that I discovered in 2010.  Blogging was revolutionary for me, in that I was able to take ideas I had written in journals and typed pages of stuff over many years and turn them into nice-looking posts, and as I began to do that, some of my earliest blog posts were transcripts of old sermons and Bible studies I had done over the years, and they are still available online even today.  Even as I write this now, my adaption of technology continues to evolve as I have in recent years also began to publish my own books (I have three now) and I feel like I am in a place I only dreamed about just 30 years ago.  Yet, in all that something is still missing, and I wanted to address that now.

Having better resources has indeed helped me tremendously, but there are days I wish I had that old zeal I had years ago back, and could marry it to this type of technology.  However, although I am more committed to my personal faith than I have ever been, the actual practice of my faith is sort of stagnant now.  Being Catholic now is something I wouldn't change for anything, but I miss things - I miss the joy of preaching for instance, as well as being in some leadership capacity in a church.  One of the reasons I am writing this now is to see if somehow I can recover some of that, and I am doing so by going back into my past to see what once was there. Although in some aspects I am exercising some of my old passions by being able to teach full-time at a Catholic school, I cannot shake that whole "fish out of water" feeling I have.  And, although I have a very active faith, I don't attend Mass as often as I would like, and I am not as involved in parish work as I would love to be either.  Much of my old religious fervor has also diminished - my faith will never change, but I do miss some of the enthusiasm I had as a young Christian.  Is it realistic or even possible to recover that, or is this just a means of growth or something?  There are many questions to be addressed, and I want to continue this series some more to maybe uncover some things.  And, in the process, maybe I can encourage others as well who are in a similar place in life.  

This discussion is multi-faceted and will continue until I get to the place I want to be at, so I will see you in the next installment of this series.