When last we checked in with Anne Rice, she was using Facebook to walk away from Christianity while saying she still loved Jesus. This, we thought, seemed understandable – as indeed the wave of sympathetic responses on the web evinced – but perhaps the old saw about the baby and the bathwater applied.
Then The Guardian asked, “Can you keep Christ and give up being a Christian?” One of their respondents, Shirley Lancaster, said of course you can.
Is Christian life essentially a religion at all? Jesus was critical of formal religion that was only for show. St Paul’s passionate teaching, following his conversion, is centred on a personal relationship with Christ – we take on ‘the mind of Christ’ not a dress code or rule book. For centuries the Christian mystical tradition has mapped the interior journey as a way to uncover the ‘inward eye’ that Jesus insisted we need in order to perceive his truth.
Much of the teaching of Jesus is about being open to a new way of seeing reality – being somehow more radically “awake”. His questions, like those of the Zen masters, shock us into a new level of consciousness. He is more concerned with how we find self-knowledge and inner transformation than fulfilling the letter of the law. The growing popularity of spiritual teachers such as Richard Rohr, Thich Nhat Hanh (both visiting the UK this summer), Anthony de Mello, Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths and Eckhart Tolle – to name but a few, confirm there is a shift to engaging with the inner truths of religion. The emphasis is on self-knowledge as the path to God and the need for inner change.
….
But I suspect when Richard Rohr addresses the audience packed into St James’s Church, Piccadilly, London it will be difficult not to conclude that there is a new energy and dynamism in our spiritual searching and a deeper engagement with the inner truths of faith – if we have one. Anne Rice is serious enough about her personal relationship with Christ to feel impelled to detach herself from the public face of religion. No doubt it is her own conscience speaking. Perhaps we just need to acknowledge that we need a new container for the shift in consciousness that is present in the Christian mind as well as in the minds of those outside the church searching for spiritual values and meaning.
A sampling of most of the editorial group at the Café reveals genuine bewilderment toward such sentiment. One of us gladly mentioned the notion that every container is cracked (even institutions), and that that’s how flowers get water.
As for this blogger, I wonder if Father Rohr, a dedicated Franciscan who has spent most of his life in Christian community, might not want his name back from Ms. Lancaster. Ditto Mr. Tolle, who at least deserves the first right of refusal to attach himself to religionless projects.
The forgetting of genuine community (that which actually costs us something of our time, energy, and treasure in which to participate and be) is anathema to any reading of the Bible.