Notes on Manifesting a Truly Interfaith Spirituality

What are workable, creative boundaries for interfaith spirituality?

This question arises out of a web of conversations I’ve had in recent days with Mike of Sites Unseen, Tom of Emergent Spirit, as well as my regular partners-in-crime, Grateful Bear and Wheezing Girl. It also comes out of the unexpectedly (but welcome!) positive response I’ve received to describing myself as a "druid with a rosary" on a recent LiveJournal post.

But what is a druid with a rosary? Where is my ultimate loyalty? If I had to choose between a Neopagan or a Christian value, belief, or practice, do I just flip a coin, or follow my whim, or see what day of the week it is? Not hardly. Aside from the "druid with a rosary" comment, I’ve also (and more often) described myself as a "Neopagan-friendly Christian." Indeed, I’ve told people on more than one occasion that the seismic spiritual shift that took place within me in 2004 can be reduced to this simple formula: I went from being a Christian-friendly Neopagan, to being a Neopagan-friendly Christian. Obviously, it’s a significant shift, for my "bottom-line" identity is now Catholic rather than earth-based. Even so, that "friendly" word deserves some more unpacking. What does it mean to be not only Neopagan-friendly, but (another reality I claim) Buddhist-friendly? Or Insert-whichever-faith-appeals-to-you-here -friendly?

Many non Christians, and especially Neopagan non-Christians, are naturally and not unjustifiably suspicious of Christians who claim to be "friendly" to their faith. It all smells of a smarmy sales job. I’ll get up close and personal to you, try to win your confidence, and just when you let your guard down around me… BAM! Here comes the witnessing. At their core, Christians are evangelists, and sooner or later an evangelist plays a finite game: s/he only wins if your current faith-allegiance loses.

With all due respect to the many Neopagans who have been burned by Christians pretending to be interested in their faith only in the pursuit of winning souls for Jesus, I’d like to bust that old paradigm wide open. And the only way I can see to do that is to unpack the etymology of the word "evangelism." It literally means "spreading the message of good news." As a newly (re-)minted Christian, my fidelity to evangelism works on this level: I want to be a purveyor of good news. I don’t want to spread joy-leeching gloom-and-doom, or morale-busting negativity, or chaos-inducing fear-concepts. In other words, I have no desire to tell anyone they’re going to hell, or that God is pissed at them because of what they do with their genitals, or that as long as they’re not a Christian they can never be truly happy, yada yada yada. Same ol’ sales job, don’t you think? After all, every successful salesman will tell you: you’ll never close the sale unless you convince your mark (er, potential client) that they need whatever it is you’re mongering. Put another way: you can’t sell churchianity to anyone unless or until s/he is good and afraid of death.

But that’s not good news; that’s bad news. I figure there’s enough existential dread in our world. Anyone with an adult level of consciousness knows that he or she is going to die, has figured out that his or her behavioral choices often fall short of their own ideals, and way deep down inside, beneath all the elaborately constructed defense mechanisms, secretly is afraid both that God doesn’t exist, or that if God does exist, then God doesn’t really love him/her. In other words, the realities of the world we live in, including the relentless beating of the Christian drum over the past 2000 years, means that I don’t need to talk up the negative. It’s in the air!

What I do need to do is talk about good news. That life really rocks when we choose love over fear. That if we can re-vision our concept of the Divine in alignment with such values as forgiveness and community, it can empower us in so many ways. That it really is okay, and a good thing, to love other people, to nurture dreams, to take good care of ourselves.

Notice that my examples of good news do not have any mention of Jesus, or the Bible, or the Church. Am I just conning my friends here? Am I waiting until they agree with me, so I can pounce and say, "But you need Jesus to be truly happy!?!?!"

Ay yi yi. The answer: NO.

Because once I start beating the Jesus drum, I’ve stopped spreading good news and  have started spreading bad news again. You know the drill: God won’t save you if you don’t accept Jesus, you can’t be a true Christian if you don’t believe in the Bible (or the authority of the Church, for those on my side of the aisle), yada yada yada….

To summarize: in choosing to identify myself as a Pagan-friendly Christian, I’ve made a commitment to living primarily by Christian values, although not in a way that attacks other faiths (like Paganism). Meanwhile, I can understand if my many Pagan friends are suspicious of me, since in their experience "Pagan-’friendly’ Christians" are usually just Christians out to win souls for their team. As a Christian, I am in fact called to be an evangelist; but I understand that to mean that I am called to spread good news. And in today’s world, and especially among Neopagans, talking about the Christian religion is the quickest way to subvert "good news," instead sounding like a tired old purveyor of religious negativity.

Now: back to my initial question:  What are workable, creative boundaries for interfaith spirituality?

Here are a few random early-morning thoughts…

1. A truly interfaith spirituality needs to be grounded somewhere. While I respect efforts to truly integrate multiple faiths, I suspect that ultimately everyone needs some sort of home base. Dual citizenship is a splendid ideal, and yet everyone was born somewhere (and not somewhere else). In other words, for me at least it is more honest and workable to talk about being a Pagan-friendly or Buddhist-friendly Christian than to say that I am a perfectly-balanced Pagan-Christian hybrid, or Christian-Buddhist hybrid. It’s the same principle you see among polyamorists who recognize that ultimately, one relationship takes top priority. There’s always an alpha spouse, if not explicitly stated, than implicitly so. Likewise, my guess is that anyone committed to interfaith spirituality sooner or later needs to say, "this is the bottom line." Pagan, Christian, Sufi, Unitarian, Buddhist, Snake-handling sex cultist… whatever your trip is. Then, from there, one can begin the exciting adventure of integrating other faith perspectives into their spiritual life.

2. Recognize that spirituality is more than just experience. I know that, on a very real level, I am a Pagan-friendly Christian (and used to be a Christian-friendly Pagan) because I simply like the experience of hanging out with both faiths. I love the mass and I dig Pagan festivals. Experience is a powerful motivator in spirituality, as well it should be. But we need to take things deeper. There’s also the question of what do we believe (and I’m not talking about dogma here, so much as what each and every person truly and intuitively "knows" in their heart to be "so"); what are our values, what practices make us feel comfortable/uncomfortable; in which community can we most truly be ourselves, etc. etc. etc.  In other words, the experience of spirituality rests on a rich and profound matrix of values, beliefs, world-views, and relationships. All are important. An authentic interfaith spirituality takes all of this into account. For me, the shift from being a Neopagan to entering the Catholic faith came as a result of a long process of recognizing that my values are more in alignment with mystical Christianity than with contemporary Neopaganism. That doesn’t mean I’m 100% the Vatican’s boy! Everyone knows I’m a dissident Catholic. But the point is, I’m less of a dissident now than I was two years ago, trying in vain to "fit in" with the values of the Pagan community. For me, it’s complicated, since I am so much a Pagan in terms of culture: I look like a hippie, I dress like a Buddhist, I’m a vegan, I love hanging out with gays and lesbians and polyamorists and deadheads and similar folks. In every way, I’m culturally more "Pagan" than "Christian" — at least in terms of how these faiths manifest in the American south. But… but… in terms of my values, my cosmology, my spiritual practices, the books I love to read, and my geekiness for medieval mysticism, in those ways I’m more of a Christian. All of this is very important: and, on the surface level of "experience", well, I can experience Divine Love and Presence just as easily at a Druid ritual as at a Catholic mass. That’s because I’m a panentheist, and believe that the Divine is omnipresent and interwoven with present reality. But that’s another rabbit hole….

3.  Be faithful to who you are, but don’t sell it. I’ve already touched on this. I love Christian mysticism, and I have discovered that more than one of my friends have found, through me, a lovely and beautiful dimension of the Christian tradition that they are not likely to find at their local Baptist church. But that’s not about me going out to win souls for the big J — it’s just a normal outgrowth of me being enthusiastic about what I love. Frankly, if any of my friends are destined to become Christian because of my "witness," that’s the Holy Spirit’s job, not mine. As I’ve said before, I want to truly respect where other people are in their faith journey. Which means that I have 0% interest in converting people, scoring theological points, or arguing the natural superiority/rightness of my position. So my commitment is to love everyone in my life, Christian, Pagan, Buddhist, whatever — exactly where they are, with no need to control or shape anyone’s destiny other than my own. Now, having said that, I still have to be true to my values. Which means that a chaos magickian who’s all about channeling energy for self-aggrandizement is going to get no support from me. Likewise, a Christian who is chauvinistic about non-Christian faiths and hostile to ideas that vary from their own, simply because they vary, will garnish no approval from me. Note that I am not out of hand rejecting chaos magick (or even fundamentalist Christianity). But when people apply their faith (whatever it is) in ways that are at variance with my values, I owe it both to them and to myself to say something.

4. Truly love the "other" faiths in your life. One of the best compliments as a writer I ever received came from Francesca De Grandis, who said this after reading Embracing Jesus and the Goddess:  that by the time she finished the book, she clearly understood that I loved both Christianity and the emerging Goddess community. And it’s true! I don’t agree with either culture 100%, and ultimately, I’ve figured out that I’m more of a Christian than not, but the bottom line remains the same: I love Christianity, I love Neopaganism, I love Buddhism, etc. etc. Yes: I love those many faiths. I like them, I enjoy them, I learn from them, I think they’re interesting, they reveal insights both into the mysteries of the soul and the grandeur of the  universe. And everyone of them is flawed. Every one, including my "home" faith of Christianity. In Christian terms, that’s because everyone makes mistakes (remember, the word "sin" simply means "mistake"). But I try not to focus on mistakes (there’s bad news again) but rather cultivate what I love, what is good and true and beautiful about all the faiths I come into contact with.

5. Accentuate the positive. Here is just a restatement of this entire long-winded post. I know I can be a Pagan-friendly Christian because I believe that the Divine is Love, and I believe that truth is linked to freedom. In other words, I am free to love. Free to love my Christian faith, and free to love Neopaganism. I can love Neopaganism without compromising my faithfulness to Christ, and I can love Christianity without turning into a hostile anti-Pagan. Even more to the point, I am free to be a Pagan-friendly Christian even though some Christians and some Pagans will always be suspicious of who I am. It’s not my job to please everybody. But my authentically-lived spirituality will be nourishing to some people. And that’s what I want to accentuate.

Okay, this went on way longer than I originally anticipated!!! But it’s part of a work in progress: and that is, Carl giving birth to this amazing path I’m on: the path of a rosary-wielding druid…