Stories & Updates

As I have stopped believing in gods, or god, or God, it isn’t a baby &  bathwater type of situation. My God has been going in pieces, in  fragments, bit by bit—not all at once, & not entirely; I have retained  some things: I have not stopped believing, for example, in wonder, or in  mystery, or paradox, or love, or meaning, or rhythms, or wisdom, or  connection—though if I’m honest even these once-stories have also  loosened their grips on me. 

There may still be a lot of wiggle-room to believe in a God or  not—but, for me, there definitely is not enough wiggle room for the  God I’d once called Father, passed down to me from Abraham, Moses,  Jesus, Paul, Aquinas, Luther, who brought us into being about 6,000  years ago, whose beloved creation even I am, who counted the hairs on  my head, whom Kierkegaard wounded & Nietzsche killed, but who for  me was resurrected in C.S. Lewis, then in the Evangelical community,  keepers of the truest faith. 

Growing up during the 1980s, at the very end of the Cold War, I knew  some things: (1) the Soviets were very bad (thank you, all of popular  culture, but also especially The Late Great Planet Earth, my Sunday  reading during boring sermons & (2) Martin Luther King was very good, for he had defeated racism during the dark ages of black television more than 10 years prior. One time, adults I trusted told me a story that I now tell to  stand in as a microcosm of the time, for me: KGB officers raided a  secret Christian church in the Soviet Union, threatening to kill anyone  who did not deny Christ, while allowing the Christ-deniers to leave; when  those weak had gone, the KGB closed the doors & turned to everyone (who were now waiting to die), saying, “We just wanted to worship with  the real Christians.” The KGB officers then put down their guns & sang  to the heavens with their fellow “real” Christians. So I grew up with a lingering-hovering question in my heart: Would I, also weak, have denied Christ? which grew into a parallel question, Would I have had the courage to march with Martin Luther  King, had I been around during his time?, such that these two questions,  in my mind, became united, tangled, caught up into each other, into one 

ever expanding question: Am I “Real”?1 

Even way back then in the 1980s, then, both the Good News & “good trouble”2  were sort of caught up together in my chest; there is  an undeniable connection between the world of Being, of invisible values, of objectivity, of Up There Out There, of ideas, of What Finally Is; all  this is, to my understanding, made manifest in the world of Doing, of  oceans & planets, of politics & warfare, of Hollywood & Skid Row; this relationship between Being & Doing, then gives rise to the possibility of  Meaning, of Ought, of Good, of Justice, of Hope. That is to say, Doing  has Meaning because of Being. For decades, these connections were  important to me, even essential, since even when I’ve been tempted to  doubt them—& even when I’ve wanted to give up hope during my  saddest most inwardly-desperate years, by replacing these connections with, say, Camus’s idea of a Being-less, Meaning-less universe’s “gentle  indifference”3—I nevertheless have always been drawn back to the  notion of Doing Being Meaning. They together just seemed to make such  natural sense to me. 

So I eventually welcomed certain philosophical agreements (when I was old enough to study & name them): (1) that we could  know nothing without God, who is Being4; (2) that we (Doing) could  have no morality (Meaning) apart from God (Being);5 (3) that the moral  arc of the universe is slow but bends toward justice6. 

In 2009, while I was faculty at a religious university, teaching philosophy  & theology & literature, we hosted a debate between one of my  colleagues & the late Christopher Hitchens, about the question of the  existence of God; while back then I thought the world of Craig’s  arguments, today, for reasons I was probably incapable of seeing in  2009, I believe far more of what Hitchens has to say than Craig7. In the debate, while Craig is right to say that Hitchens does not  refute Craig’s arguments per se, Craig nevertheless fails to acknowledge  Hitchens’s implied underlying claim, which always seems to be just 

beneath his criticisms of Craig’s Christianity/theism: Even if as you say there is a God who is loving, a God who is accessible to humankind,  a God who is just, a God who loves peace—a good God at all—then  your evil institutions could never know anything of that loving & good God; your arguments carry zero credibility. The logical conclusion, then, of Hitchens’s rebuttals is perhaps  not, “Therefore, a good & loving God could not exist”; nevertheless,  Craig seems to be holding on only by a logical sliver, a philosophical  loophole (something small enough to hide within the phrase “not  necessarily”). After all, if the religious God-knowers are mistaken about  their own access to God (a fact that should be clear, given Hitchens’s  criticisms), then in what Real sense could God actually exist? And  attached to that question is a much bigger one, which I attach a lot of  anxiety to: if Hitchens is taking away Being, then how come he isn’t  also doing away with Meaning? 

A not-so-generous way of framing the Craig’s view, is that if  God disappears, then Craig will just take his ball with him & go home. A  slightly nicer way of saying it, is that Craig is guilty of using fear as  evidence for God/Being—because if God disappears then so does  knowledge, so do morals, so does meaning, so does love, so does  anything Real—& so disappears, then, the moral arc of the universe, as  well as my participation in being Real. 

For a few years in there, then, I’ve felt myself within a painful inward  ALotOfQuestions, like a feeling low in my guts: How could Doing have Meaning without Being? Even so, while I grant it is very tempting to follow the Being-less logic of nihilism/ existentialism/ absurdism/ we-Believe-in-Nothing-Lebowksi, it is also as impossible to divorce myself finally from feeling  that life is somehow Meaning-full. 

Therefore, I offer my most generous-pretty way to say what I want to  believe: The size & age of the universe alone (& my size & age relative  to it, which invites me, compels me, forces me to wonder about the  Meaning of my own significance) is itself something to marvel at — & to worship. Just as it is, the known universe surpasses the Infinity of  the ancient poets & medieval theologians. So whatever awe or power  our ancestors ascribed to gods in our scriptures, to Yahweh, we can  ascribe-&-more to just the size & age & diversity of the physical  universe; it is wider & deeper & older & more abundant than any of our imaginations, than all of them, ever, combined. 

The story, then, of merelyDoing, of Doing-without-Meaning, may  be all we have—but the universe also seems to echo into some kind of  Meaning, even if we are the only ones writing the Meaning-story as we  go. The Story of the universe, then, not only Is; & it not only Does; it also Means.But how can we get Meaning without Being? 

Maybe the universe asks itself, through us, questions of  Meaning—& it writes poems, & tells stories, & shows how the world is  like itself, telling itself the marvelous Meaning-story. — & so that echo — & how it echoes, & where it echoes to, & into, & within — that is  where I want to rumble toward. But this formulation of Doing Being Meaning has me in a kind of feeling  like I’m in a kind of dead-end, even if the dead-end is hopeful-poetic—since even if I myself am the one shaping Meaning, which way should I  tell the poem to Mean, & why? 

Part of me, then, needs Is God-Being Real? to be either-or, a  yes-or-no, a God-is-or-God-is-not, since even the atheists can be tempted  toward Nothingness. I feel the importance of this question, the urgency  of it, even the anxiety of it. It is a This-or-That, perhaps, of my spiritual  Lizard Brain, an extension of survival-mode, now in a mythic realm; I feel  in need of a story of Being that gives rise to Meaning, through Doing. 

But how can I honestly accept the faith it would take? I’d have  already stared into that Meaning-less-ness, that NothingnessAbyss, that faceless universe, just to declare, dissonance &denial, Aha! Meaning!? To declare Meaning would, though, help me justify my decades-long study of Meaning: from philosophy in college, to storytelling in  graduate school, to rhetoric as my career choice, to my religion, & to  my roles as son, father, husband, friend. I am covered in maybe-Meaning.  I am Real in that world. Having read Dante, for example, helps me make  sense of mountains, forests, all the other stories I’ve heard or told, the  feeling I have of friendship with my dogs, the satisfaction of campfire  conversations, looking up at the stars, & the Meaning of the  transformative justice I want to belong to. I love Meaning. I need  Meaning.I am filled with a feeling I’d call transcendent, worship, awe,  wonder, gutsDarklyGutsHoly, it is mystic, it is marvelous—whenever I  think of how the Big & Beautiful Ideas all finally tell their Meaning along  the same Way8. I love the universalYes of psychedelic knowledge9; I  welcome that for thousands of years shamans knew far more than Freud  ever did about the unconscious10; I am glad Alcoholics Anonymous  leveraged William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study  in Human Nature & the Sermon on the Mount to restore so many broken lives; I see how we all seem to be longing desperately, religiously, all  sort of gurgling together, marveling around a Big Meaning-full Something,  with a needing-hoping that it is we need to be Real. 

We are making stories of nature, founding philosophies of economics on the so-called  “survival of the fittest,”always writing poems, always telling stories,  always making Meaning, which gives our hope direction. But maybe “hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, & reads a word where  in fact only a scribble exists.”11 

I’ll tell you, it sure would feel easier to declare Aha! Meaning!, but even  spiritual denial is denial. So while I’d feel philosophically safe just to say  something & hope it were Real—and while my view would even be  couched in a familiar language of faith (incidentally helping me solve that "moral arc of the universe" problem, that Am I Real? problem)- would it be actually, fully, wholly honest of me? 

I don’t think it would. 

This keeps running through my head: “The real difference  between us & chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large  numbers of individuals, families, & groups. This glue has made us the  masters of creation”12 If that’s true, & if I’m just telling myself stories,  I believe that by letting go of the Meaning-story I fear I’m also letting  go of Me Being Real, a story I’m personally incentivized & invested in being intact.In other words, how do I convince my deepest heart that William  Lane Craig can’t, at some spiritual level, take his ball & go home? Do I need a god of some kind, some kind of ultimate Being in  order to ground the Meaning of my Doing? 

One day, I wrote: dear God please be real to us because of your beauty  so we will never feel so frightened. Another day, I wrote: Jesus, are you  real? & another day, I read: “[…] insisting on a literal belief in the  Virgin birth of Jesus is very good theological symbolism, but unless it  translates into a spirituality of an interior poverty, readiness to concede,  & human vulnerability, it is largely a mere lesson memorized, as Isaiah  puts it (Isaiah 29:13): it saves no one. Likewise, an intellectual belief  that Jesus rose from the dead is a good start, but until you are struck  by the realization that the crucified & risen Jesus is a parable about the  journey of all humans & even the universe, it is a rather harmless, if not  harmful, belief that will leave you & the world largely unchanged.”13 & another day, I wrote: I am a disciple of the Way of Jesus; Christianity is small compared to the dream of God I wrestle. I reword things. I go & go. I wonder deeply. I commit  myself not to a god or theology but to a Mystery. I begin again. I arrive  experientially, emotionally, spiritually, to endless wrestling that the  Teacher named 3,000 years ago, something I’d once memorized, but  now I knew its Meaning14: “He has made everything beautiful in its time.  He has also set eternity in their hearts, yet so that man can’t find out  the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end.”15 

But maybe the problem is not the problem. The liberation theology of  James Cone has taught me that the Christianity I was taught, a white  Evangelical version of American Protestantism, failed to act upon the  theological & existential nightmare happening before their own eyes for  decades during the Jim Crow era: the killing of innocent men by being  hanged from trees; they failed to recognize Christ, that is to say; they  failed to be Christian in the truest sense, even while the greatest  theological (white) minds of the 20th Century composed their most  famous works16. All of my white Evangelical theological ancestors failed to mention the horror of Christ being killed, of innocents being lynched, which had currently been happening among them. Their discussions of  Being and Meaning, then, of theology, had completely missed the point,  blinding them from the Doing right in front of them. 

Similarly, it is an existential threat, not the pondering of poems,  that compels theological insights in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the  Sower. Lauren is in a post-apocalyptic nightmare that forces her to  conceive of God as Change—a practicality; a need; for what else is there  but survival; to study change, then, and to learn how to shape change  in response: this is the source of Meaning, it seems, for Butler. That is to say: this science fiction is a post-apocalyptic account  of how Being & Meaning (Earthseed) are co-derivatives of Doing, guided  by the constant existential threat upon the characters in the novel. How  will they survive? not Am I Real? is the driving question. The values they, vulnerable, discover in order to shape God, are  also the core values at the foundation of Emergent Strategy17 , a growing  philosophy of healing & change within social activist communities. Ultimately, it may not be very helpful to wonder whether I am Real. That  is the question of an anxious child, after all, even if it is also the question  at the center of William Lane Craig’s threat to take his ball & go home. It's all philosophy, approximations, metaphors playing dress-up, thought- disagreements between two white men at an Evangelical university back when Fox News still found it credible to winder where Obama' s still  new presidency warranted declaring the end of racism in America. Instead, context, experience, existential threat—these are what  my view into the Civil Rights Movement, the theology of James Cone18, the life of Assata Shakur19, theabolitionist philosophy of Angela Davis20, the art & activism of Patrisse Cullors21, & so on have to offer—they  shape God. If death gives meaning to life, then maybe the existential  threat of death gives life to “Christ.” Maybe Meaning is not Being contemplated, but the Doing itself. It is from this angle, then, & from up out of this context &  questions, that I have come to study Emergent Strategy, as I see it as  the philosophical outcome of so many threads of conversations. I come  as a willing, wondering, worshipping non-theist, who loves poems &  Meaning, who loves justice, but wants to understand it as both  transcendent and concrete. 

1 The thing about the word Real is, it’s so useful, & so loose, & so easy to  equivocate with.  

2 John Lewis 

3 Albert Camus, The Stranger 

4 Rene Descartes, Meditations

5 Paul Copan, “The Argument from Morality” 

6 Martin Luther King, paraphrasing a Theodore Parker sermon

7 It does not please me to implicate myself as having been allied with that  school & worldview, but it is where I came from nevertheless. 

8 Rami Shapiro, Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent

9 Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind 

10 Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman 

11 John Updike, “Pigeon Feathers.” 

12 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, emphasis  added.

13 Richard Rohr, Universal Christ 

14  Bright Eyes, “I need some meaning I can memorize,” lyrics from “Lover I  Don’t Have to Love” 

15 Ecclesiastes 3:11 

16 James Cone, The Cross & the Lynching Tree 

17 adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing  Worlds 

18 James Cone, Black Power & Black Theology 

19  Assata Shakur, Assata 

20 Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 

21 Patrisse Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist