A reader of this blog sent me the following question:
Hi Carl, I’ve been reading quite a bit of your blog. It seems like back around 2016-2017, you were making an attempt to be more orthodox, while in the last few years, you seem to have become more open. For example, back in 2016, you answered someone’s question about the Church with what seemed like a very strongly held belief about the importance of being part of the Church (“Do Contemplatives Need the Church?”). But a similar question in 2021 got a very different answer that I felt really beautifully distinguished between Catholicism as institution and Catholicism as spirituality (“Catholic Spirituality Versus the Institutional Church”). Even in your 24 meditations in 2024 video, you seem much more embracing of other paths, while in another post in 2016 you said you weren’t doing much inter-faith work at the moment (“You Wrote Books About Paganism?!?”).
Again none of that is meant as a criticism or judgment; I’m just curious since there seems to be a real difference and I’m wondering if I’m imagining it. Regardless, I’ve been finding many of your posts to be incredibly helpful.
What a great question. Has there been growth in my personal spiritual life that could be characterized as becoming “more open”? The short answer would be yes, I think I have. But let me also give a more nuanced answer about that process, and finally I want to reflect on this distinction between “open” and “orthodox” that I hope might be helpful for people who read this blog.
A Brief Tour of My Evolving Faith Identity
I was received into the Catholic Church through confirmation in 2005, when I was in my mid-40s. As an infant, I was baptized a Protestant on an Air Force Base where my Dad was stationed, and my family was active in a neighborhood Lutheran Church during my childhood and adolescence. After a stint in charismatic communities during my high school years, I went on to spend my young adult years practicing my faith in the Episcopal Church. I should also note that I’ve had seasons of alienation from church membership, and a number of years prior to becoming Catholic where I tried to balance being a liberal/contemplative Christian with exploration of pagan and earth-based spiritualities.
But eventually I landed in the Catholic world, drawn not only by my love for the mystics but also my attraction to the spirituality of the Trappists (a Trappist monastery is only about 22 miles from where I live, and it wasn’t long before I became a lay associate of that monastery).
I think like many adult-confirmed Catholics, I had an extended honeymoon period where I had simply fallen in love with Catholic spirituality, and during that “honeymoon” I was simply more invested in the blessings of the faith community and more willing to give the problems or failings associated with the institution a pass. Looking back, I can see that the process of moving from “more orthodox” to “more open” took a number of years. There were a number of signposts along the way:
- I was deeply troubled by the Pennsylvania report on clergy sex abuse and institutional cover-ups that came out in 2018.
- The pandemic lockdown, which meant pausing the “hustle” of ongoing church participation, gave me some time to reflect on what it was all really about (and for).
- Most recently, the rise of Christian nationalism and the troubling overlap between Trumpism and conservative Christianity (both Catholic and evangelical) led me to question the complexity of the relationship between faith and spirituality and religious institutionalism.
All in all, I think the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was really the tipping point for me. I actually was doing some interfaith work at the time, and was a member of the Atlanta Shambhala Center; Shambhala was dealing with its own problems with leadership causing harm, and my 2018 blog post Between Shambhala and the Catholic Church really captures how appalled I was at what seemed to me to be a pervasive problem of institutional corruption, that crossed even religious lines. Since then, other churches (notably the Southern Baptist Convention) have had their own scandals. As time passed, I was increasingly troubled by the question of whether institutionalism is actually a problem that gets in the way of healthy and creative spirituality.
In my Shambhala/Catholic blog post, I use the metaphor of a burning building to describe how I viewed the church. I made a point of saying that the only “building” we should attempt to save is the wisdom tradition, not the institution that supposedly exists to steward that tradition. So my journey toward “being more open” has, from the perspective of today, been years in the making.
Now, regarding interspirituality. As I have written both on my blog and in some of my books, I have a long-standing relationship not only with Christianity and Christian mysticism, but also with Buddhism (and eastern spirituality in general) and various pagan/indigenous/Celtic/Goddess/nature-based spiritualities. The logo of this blog incorporates an enso (symbolic of Zen Buddhism), a Celtic Cross and a Celtic trinity knot work, symbolizing my love for Christian mysticism and Celtic spirituality (both pagan and Christian).
But it has been a long journey for me to be fully at peace with my own multi-layered approach to spirituality. It is fair to say that during my honeymoon period as a Catholic, I very much downplayed my interpiritual interests, both in my writing and in my personal spiritual practice. In retrospect, I suppose it was only a matter of time before my authentic interest in and love for interspirituality would reassert itself.
So while it is true that in 2016 inter-faith or interspiritual practice was not a big part of my life at that moment, the greater reality is that I have, like Thomas Merton and many others, had a long interest in interspirituality that goes back to college or even high school. I would say one of the abiding questions for my own ongoing spiritual journey is “how do I balance a deep love and respect for the distinctive wisdom of the Christian mystical tradition with an equally deep love for the promise of the wisdom that emerges from interspiritual study and practice?” Friends, I am still working on that one!
Meanwhile, concurrent with my growing sense of conscientious criticism of institutional Christianity was a parallel but not unrelated resurgence of my interest particularly in Buddhism (but, yes, in all interspirituality in general). By 2021 I had discerned a clear desire to dive deeper into my sense of being called to learn the dharma, especially meditation practices that I see as deeply resonant and consistent with contemplative Christianity. Over the past three years I have found that the witness of people like Thomas Merton, Elaine MacInnes, Ruben Habito and Paul Knitter (among many others) has become increasingly important to me: in short, I’ve begun to identify as a dual-practitioner (language I first discovered in Susan J. Stabile’s lovely book Growing in Love and Wisdom: Tibetan Buddhist Sources for Christian Meditation).
What does it mean to be a dual-practitioner? It’s not a hybrid (like 50% Buddhist/50% Christian, or whatever percentages you fancy), but to be truly a committed follower of Jesus Christ who is simultaneously a sincere student of the dharma. In the words of Paul Knitter, “Jesus and Buddha both come first!” That’s messy and imperfect and even with the witness of many writers still feels like uncharted territory but it’s where I feel the Spirit has led me.
There are so many other aspects of this story. But this post is already too long, and I do want to comment on the question of orthodoxy versus openness. So let’s just say that for me, like Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating and many other Christian contemplatives, maturing in my spiritual life has led me to have a much more, yes, open relationship with the institutional dimension of Christianity. I still believe in Jesus, and I still believe in the importance of community. But I have become very much one who questions the power and authority of religious institutions, recognizing that they can cause tremendous harm.
A 1939 quote from the American mystic Howard Thurman neatly sums up my feelings:
The mystic seems always to be the foe of institutional religion… It is profoundly true that he does not stand in need of the institution or the institutional forms as such. Even in Catholicism any careful reading of the testimony of the mystics convinces one that the church has no real friend in the mystic.
“Orthodox” and “Open” — Are They Mutually Exclusive?
When my reader first posed his question to me, I thought, “Of course, my spiritual trajectory has been from “orthodox” to “open.” But the more I thought about it, the more I don’t think that’s a very helpful distinction.
I think it’s a mistake to assume that “orthodox faith” and “spiritual openness” are necessarily at odds. I think Thurman helps us to see that the real tension here is not between orthodoxy and openness but rather between institutionalism and mysticism. Now, I know Rick Doblin is famous for saying “mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism” (and I agree with him), but even here, I would argue that religious fundamentalism represents a particular type of community — that is very hierarchical, patriarchal, and controlling. In short, institutional or at least institutionalizing. Fundamentalism is more than just an ideology, it is a level of consciousness. This is why there are Christian fundamentalists and Hindu fundamentalists and atheist fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists: their ideologies are all radically different, but they have a similar type of consciousness, deeply authoritarian, suspicious of outsiders, and convinced that they and they alone possess the one objective truth. Fundamentalism exists because it is embedded in both a level of consciousness and a type of social or communal organization that reflects that consciousness on a collective scale. Mysticism, therefore, is not only the antidote to an individual level of consciousness but also to a type of social organization that reflects or embeds that level of consciousness: in short, the institutionalizing type of organization.
Incidentally, organizational theorists like Frederick Laloux are actively exploring how we can create new community forms that are non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, non-centralized: in short, more “mystical” than “fundamentalist.” And although their work is primarily secular in nature, it has fascinating implications for how we can organize churches and other religious bodies in the future (see Reinventing Organizations for an accessible introduction to this fascinating topic).
All this is to say that I believe there is, or can be, such a thing as a “mystical orthodoxy” — akin to what Brian D. McLaren calls his Generous Orthodoxy. A generous/mystical orthodoxy still appreciates and affirms a communal dimension of faith, but eschews the shadow side of institutionalism: so it is an orthodoxy that joins Jesus in criticizing existing systems of power and privilege in the hope for and service of creating better, more expansive, and (yes) more “open” models of community for the future (and hopefully the present).
With that in mind, I’d like to propose instead of a distinction between “Orthodox” and “Open” that my journey, like Merton’s and others’, might more usefully be described as moving from “Closed-Faith” to “Open-Faith” — and that either of these positions can be conscientiously held as “orthodox” or “faithful” positions in relation to Christian spirituality and teachings. Open-orthodoxy and closed-orthodoxy probably represent different kinds of religious ideology, but that’s okay. On the level of doctrine, we have been fighting bitterly ever since the Council in Jerusalem couldn’t figure out what to do with the gentiles (see Acts 15). So orthodoxy is not the same thing as “ortho-dogma”! Orthodoxy actually means “proper praise,” not “correct doctrine” as it is often misinterpreted. To be an orthodox Christian (with a lowercase “o”) simply means to be one who is committed to faith in Christ as a unifying fact of the spiritual life. Many so-called “orthodox” Christians disagree hopelessly over dogma and doctrine. When they persist in fighting over that, it’s a dead giveaway that their orthodoxy is more fundamentalist than mystical. Of course, mystics are not above having a spirited conversation over how they may see things very differently from one another! But a mystical spirituality, generally speaking, has much more spaciousness for a diversity of viewpoints. You can see evidence of that in the writings of the desert elders, St. Benedict, Julian of Norwich, St. Teresa of Ávila, all the way down to Evelyn Underhill and Thomas Merton in recent times.
Finally, since I’ve already recommended so many books in this post, let me wrap up with one more. And while this is specifically about Catholics and Catholicism, I think the theological foundation of it can be applied to any faith community. The book is Why You Can Disagree and Remain a Faithful Catholic by Philip S. Kaufman. I think the title says it all.
