Mairs
Home | In Progress | Biography | Reviews | Works | eMessage
Good News! Finding the Holy Here and Now
Even though 82% of people in the United States pray to God daily, according to one study, religion has taken on an unsavory character for many, appearing to have fallen into the hands of dirty old men or to have been co-opted by simpleminded little boys brandishing at some “evil” opponent a holy book in one hand and a weapon in the other. Who wants to engage in practices tainted by such associations? Still, some find the discipline demanded by a practical theology worth the risk of being taken by the world for a pervert, a terrorist, a superstitious simpleton, or an outright nutter.
Reared a Congregationalist, I converted to Catholicism in 1977; I now worship with a small eucharistic community dedicated to peace and justice. Through this affiliation, which has come to animate my faith and principles moment by moment, I have grown uneasy with the label “Christian.” I suspected from the outset that I wasn’t a “real” Catholic, not in the Roman sense, and I have become more than content to call myself an alternative Catholic or a Zen Catholic. But I still thought of myself as a Christian. Gradually, however, I began to see that “the Christ” referred not so much to an entity as to an accretion of ideas, formed across centuries, largely by men, many of whom appeared to suffer from considerable sexual anxiety, and imposed systematically, often by intimidation, upon various populations (among them my own gender), not all of whom benefitted from their espousal. This setup sounded to me more descriptive of the Romans than the Christians.
Truth to tell, I recognize now, the meanings commonly ascribed to Christianity entail an accretion of beliefs, some of which I simply can not embrace. If belief in personal salvation defines a Christian, for instance, then I am not entitled to call myself one. How, then, to identify myself? Perhaps the term “pre-Christian” is as descriptive as any other, harking back to the earliest days after Jesus’s execution, when his followers gathered over simple meals, bread and wine and perhaps a little fish, and recollected his words as best they could. Over time, others joined them, who had to be told his story, who had to be taught his precepts, and one can easily understand how tellers might blur some details, elaborate others, add some to suit the needs of a particular audience for comfort, discipline, excitement, mystery. Gradually, to suit the inclinations of his followers, Jesus became less a rabbinical figure than a messianic one. But I remain drawn to the Teacher.
The book on which I am working will reflect my effort to come at the foundational ideas that set Christianity in motion and to conceive a world based on their implementation. Because I’m not a Biblical scholar, I look to The Five Gospels of the Jesus Seminar and the reconstructed Q sayings to reveal what an itinerant Jewish teacher on fire with a vision of a transformed reality might have said to his followers—both then and today. I will focus, much as I did in my earlier volume of theological reflections, Ordinary Time, on the quotidian elements of human experience. Much of that work was intensely autobiographical, however. Although I will continue to write in the form of the personal essay, my gaze will turn outward to some of the political and social issues to which we must attend if we want the world to remain habitable very much longer: imperialist ambition, for example, and the greedy gobbling of human and natural resources. Among subjects I am sure to take up are saints and sin and suffering.
I envision this project as a thought experiment based on the premise of the Good News: The Kingdom of God exists right here, right now, among us. Jesus is not making a promise here. He’s stating a reality: the Kingdom of God is in our midst, whether we can perceive it or not. We may dwell in it; we may not; or (and I think this is the most likely scenario) we may drift in and out of it depending on our current level of consciousness. Jesus’s teachings provide a way (although I’m not sure he would claim it the only way) to achieve and sustain it. What I’m wondering is how the world might be altered if we responded to its vagaries according to his basic precepts: faithful tranquility, forgiveness, generosity, love.
Many people seem eager to contemplate spiritual matters without necessarily committing themselves to a specific religious tradition, and because I have the capacity to address such concerns in a manner neither didactic nor sanctimonious nor airy fairy, I believe the essays will form a book not merely viable but spirited and even joyful as well.