WOP Wednesday with splash screen

This sermon has created a conversation that a denomination I grew up in has badly needed.

6/19/2014

I don’t want to go to a place called heaven

          I remember as a child when I was first taught that there was a place called heaven. I don’t remember how old I was but I do remember the kind of emotions I felt when somebody told me that there is another world or reality where I can cuddle with a lion, swim with the fishes, fly with the birds, wrestle with a bear, fly in space, visit different planets, and so on. Basically, there was no limit to what I can imagine heaven would be like and what I can experience there. I especially wanted to make it to heaven because I could live forever and ever, I would never experience death if I made it there. I was taught that after I die, I would either end up in heaven or be forever annihilated if I don’t make it there. My religious upbringing taught that people who didn’t make it to heaven would be destroyed and die forever, I guess that would be better than eternal torment that certain religious Christian traditions taught if you didn’t make to heaven. As far as I can recall from childhood, it became instinctual for me to think and feel that my ultimate purpose in life would be to make sure that I make it to heaven and that this should be everybody’s ultimate purpose as well, hence evangelizing. Life for me was to make sure that everything I do in life will hopefully lead me to this magical place. I refuse to die forever no matter the cost, I can’t bear the thought of ceasing to exist forever and ever as well as having no consciousness.

 My solution or formula to make sure that I make it to heaven was to remain true to the things I was taught by my religious culture. To be certain that I make it there, I must remain a “believer in God” and live life according to what my religious culture taught and expected of me. As a practicing "religionist", I tried to pattern my actions and behavior to conform to what I believed was the larger reality. If I can do this, I will make it to this place called heaven. “What would it profit a man to gain the world, and lose his soul”, isn’t that what Jesus said? Yes, I want to be “saved”, who wouldn’t want to be saved? Salvation for me was to be able to make it to haven and escape death. It was the opportunity to someday experience bliss and live happily ever after next to God, my family, and my friends who hopefully make it to heaven like me.

            Progressively through the years, I began to concern myself with my existence, as in learning to reconcile what I’ve come to know and what I experience in my daily life. Something like Soren Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which focuses on finding meaning in what sometimes feels like a meaningless existence. The living breathing me that experiences doubt, fear, vulnerability, anxiety, apathy, despair, contradictions, feelings of failure, antagonism, cynicism, and most things humans experience that make us wonder whether life is all worth living. I have also experienced inspiration, hope, gratitude, connection, motivation, love, joy, peace, beauty, laughter; all those positive adjectives that make it seem worth it being human.

Jesus made a statement about the Kingdom of God as being among us, he also described the Kingdom of God as being within you. In the past, I have always equated the Kingdom of God as heaven. The place I want to go to someday and hopefully make it there if I live the kind of life my religious culture and paradigm expected of me. When I reflect on Jesus’ Kingdom statements, I can’t help but think of the “moment” rather than that of an imaginary place somewhere in the clouds as when he states that the Kingdom is among us. I also can’t help but begin to see the Kingdom as a state of “being” in contrast to some material place that I will be rewarded with for “believing” or achieving a “sinless” life, as when Jesus states that the Kingdom is within you. Salvation seems to be more about recognizing what’s true without and within me and then desiring to “become”.

Recently, I have begun to see spirituality as more of a quest for recognizing what we are blinded to rather than something that we try to create or make happen. When we see what we have been blinded to, that’s experiencing what Jesus probably means by, “you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free”. When we realize something that we haven’t realized before, I call that a change in perspective, and perspective can be the difference between hope and despair. The Kingdom is something we learn to recognize because it is among us and it is within us. Jesus also describes the Kingdom as something like a seed that a farmer scatters on the ground and should grow to become a mature plant. This metaphor tells me that salvation also has more to do with growing and evolving as a human. The Kingdom of God or heaven becomes more meaningful when we see it as something having more to do with growing like a plant, except as human beings we grow into something like being able to create beauty, find peace, and give love; three things that a favorite author named Frank Shaffer describes as the ultimate in the human experience.

            It’s been a while since I desired making it to a place called heaven or be “saved”. Perhaps it’s because my old concept of heaven prompted me to act in a way that was inauthentic, maybe heaven was an escape mentally to justify inaction in a world that needs attention, or maybe heaven just began to feel like a place so small because I can’t seem to imagine or grasp hold of what this place may be like anymore. For now I’m going to see heaven as something that I can work on experiencing in the moment, just as Jesus describes the Kingdom to be as something that’s among you and within you. Maybe there is a place somewhere out there that we can call heaven, but for now, my priority is not going to a place but experiencing “this” place with all the adjectives that make me feel that this life is worth living. Salvation or experiencing heaven is learning to find meaning and experiencing “becoming”, this is heaven to me.

             

Why I’m blogging?

         

Been thinking about blogging for a long time. I don’t consider myself much of a writer and really don’t have much experience with it. I guess turning forty had something to do with it. About a year before I turned forty I kind of went through an identity crisis of sorts. I guess I started thinking really hard about what I’m really doing when I’m doing what I’m doing. My life pretty much consists of my role as a husband, a father, former church elder, a registered nurse, and probably lots of idleness in between. I considered these roles as my identity or metaphorically speaking, the container that I have built as my identity, but deep inside I wasn’t too sure about the substance in the container. Since my college years, I’ve considered myself pretty religious and tried to do what I thought were the right things. I even majored in theology because it just felt like the “right” thing to do and it was interesting to me. Although I had religiosity, I also felt the emotions that came along with believing in a God that was somewhat involved in my life. The concept of the God I interacted with, probably had a lot more to say about me and my worldview than of God. It was oftentimes common for me to feel that I never measured up to the ideals I felt God and I expected of myself. This has resulted with bouts of shame and guilt throughout most of my life.

I’ve been through a series of stages in this journey but for the most part, my beliefs no matter how they’ve evolved through time seemed to manifests itself in the context of certainty. I finally came to a point where the contradictions in my life became too much and I had exhausted my resources to deal with my inconsistencies, contradictions, and unsettledness. My unsettledness was hurting my family as I projected my frustrations towards them in subtle and not so subtle ways. I could not understand why I was a complete opposite of what I believed. My certainty did not provide an answer to my humanness and something needed to change or my brokenness will lead to further brokenness. I decided to submit myself to a God that I wasn’t sure existed. I did this at the turn of the New Year in 2013. What I said to the God I wasn’t sure existed was, “to do what it takes, even to the point of wounding me” in order to help me know what I’m really looking for as well as resolve my unsettled and what I felt was a shameful life. Ever since that time, my life has not been the same, I would admonish anybody to be careful what you ask for, especially from a God you may not sure exists. I went through some deep darkness of the soul and a few times may have been on the verge of a mental breakdown. 2013 was by far the roughest year I’ve ever experienced. The anxiety, depression, loneliness, feeling of failure, hopelessness, are just a few neurotic characteristics I experienced. Through it all, I began to discover my true self and the wounds that I have been carrying around for a long time. My definition of the true self is the child in us trying to find a home. That’s the best way I can define it for now as I’m in the process of better understanding the true self in contrast to the false self. I guess it feels like I am entering a new era in my life’s journey. It’s one with more reflection and contemplation about meaning and purpose. Statements from Jesus like “in order to find one’s life you must lose it” or one must “leave your father, mother, or family” in order to follow me are statements that are beginning to take on a new meaning in what feels like a new era in my life. I mention Jesus as part of my reflection and thoughts because I cannot seem to shake this spiritual figure from my life. His teachings and example have begun to truly challenge me and I have had to decide whether he is serious and whether I should take him seriously. Jesus messes with my head and he won’t let me stay the same. Jesus seems to have insights into the depths of life that push me beyond my illusions and into what could possibly be the truth about life.

This blog are my rants about my questions, doubts, new insights, evolving beliefs, deconstructing my paradigms, reconstructing these paradigms, it is the process of working on changing the “old wineskins into the new wineskins in order to hold the new wine” that Jesus talks about. It is also comparing and contrasting the old era and the new era in my journey. In the old era, I have learned the rules and doctrines and kept it well, but after a while I began to feel that I have been found wanting. As in the words of the Dalai Lama, “learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly”.  Jesus seems to have known how to break the rules properly and that has made all the difference in this world.  He went beyond the laws and institutions which has made some people feel safe as important as they are to some and into the spirit that moves our soul to find connectedness, meaning, purpose, and reason for our existence. This blog is also about me, attempting to try to be vulnerable and authentic as I can possibly be as I learn to shed my “false” self in order to reveal and live my true self. This blog is about my journey which is going to be filled with a human being who is not certain about much anymore but of a human that is entering into the wonder and mystery of what I define as grace. I guess grace for me is believing in the ultimate good and that the good is trying to have its way with me no matter what I believe about myself or how discouraging any current situation or this world may look. The good that seeks to transform and elevate despite my shortcomings is what I would call grace. Grace is kind of like a guide that keeps me going on a path towards purpose and meaning and it keeps reminding me to never give up on getting there. My hunch is that purpose and meaning have something to do with love and that ultimately our existence may be about growing into and experiencing love. Learning to love and learning to do it well, is what I feel we were created for. That is the home that I am wanting to find. The beginning to finding that home, is unlearning and relearning the path which can lead me there. This blog is a small attempt to jot down a few things about that journey.